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Hear more about our Savannah27 strategy from our Group CEO, Iñaki Ereño, and other leaders from across Bupa. Hosted by Nigel Sullivan, Chief Sustainability & People Officer.
Running Elephant podcast
Episode 44 – Nick Stone, CEO, APAC
In this episode, Nigel Sullivan, Chief Sustainability and People Officer, speaks to Nick Stone CEO of the Asia Pacific Market Unit about how things are going with Savannah27 and our three emblematic projects so far, and what's next for APAC.
Please note: this transcript has been produced by AI, with minor revisions made by a member of the Group Internal Communications Team, so please forgive any grammatical inaccuracies.
Transcript
Nigel:
Welcome to another episode of the Running Elephant. I'm Nigel Sullivan, Bupa’s Chief Sustainability and People Officer. Today I'm joined by Nick Stone, CEO of our Asia Pacific Market Unit, APAC. Nick, welcome back to the Running Elephant.
Nick:
Great to be here, Nige and thanks for having me.
Nigel:
Great to see you, here we are. We're in Madrid at the moment. It's very warm here at the moment and we're here as a CEC with the board at the minute as well. I'm going to ask you a little bit, Nick, about Savannah27 and how you're making that come into action in APAC, but maybe just a bit of a reminder for our viewers. What's APAC?
Nick:
Good question, Nige. APAC is more than 50% of the Group's profit, so I hope everyone knows where and who APAC is. But APAC is predominantly three countries, so it's Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. And what makes up those countries is about 170-180 dental clinics, 50 optical clinics, and we’ve got 23 medical health centres now - one mental health business and obviously a very big health insurer. So, it's probably the biggest business in the group. And then we've got the aged care business of about 57 homes in Australia. In New Zealand we've got about 70 odd, aged care and retirement villages. In Hong Kong, we've got about 100 clinics, medical centre clinics, and health insurance business. So, it's quite diverse from a portfolio perspective and quite different you know across the different geographies as well.
Nigel:
Thanks Nick and you're going through like a real transformation of the business around connected care etc., linked in with Savannah27. How’s Savannah27 been received by the team?
Nick:
Yeah, I think for me Savannah27 is really resonating with the team. I think when I talk to Iñaki, I talk about the Elephant era being the foundational era, and it was the era of the intangibles. So, there was a lot of foundational work being done around moving, you know, apps to the cloud and these sorts of things, turning around businesses, making sure they're actually performing properly. But it wasn't as much you could touch and see what was going on. It was more around making sure that we ran the businesses a lot better than we probably have done in the past. What's great about the Savannah era is there's so many tangible things that you can see, you will understand what your role is in the ecosystem, to see how we can get to that sort of ultimate goal of having a personalised health plan for every one of our customers but making sure we navigate those customers through the various different health journeys as part of that personalised health plan. So, that's the thing that I think resonates most with me and why I can actually convince people why Savannah is so important. But I think it also links back to our purpose where people can see that we need mental health clinics, we need GP clinics, we need a digital app that navigates people through the ecosystem because it is quite complex. So, all of the pieces of the puzzle from the foundation work through element to the Savannah era is really bringing it to life to what it actually means to making a difference of someone's health and wellbeing.
Nigel:
We talk about funding and provision and I'm focusing on Australia here really, which is the biggest part of the Asia Pacific for us. But we were very much a funder with maybe dental and some health-related stuff, you know, around very important stuff with the ADF, you know the Australian Defence Force etc. But getting this connected care thing that you talked about, and this personalisation is really breaking new ground in the market, isn't it? I mean it's not really been done before.
Nick:
No one has. A lot of the health insurers in Australia are standalone health insurers. Some of our competitors are delving into this space. But what I don't think they've done and we're obviously you know in, I think we're a little bit behind in some areas, but in another year or two we'll surpass our competitors. But what they're not really doing that I see is linking the branding of Blua, the branding of the Bupa clinics and the provision businesses and bringing that to the value proposition of the health insurance player at the end of the day or the health insurance customers at Bupa. So, ultimately, go back a number of years, there was no benefit to go to a Bupa Dental clinic, if you're a health insurance customer, there was no integration there.
Nigel:
There was no relation between the two.
Nick:
There were no synergies, there was no optimisation with respect to retention or NPS. But we know now there's an 18% better retention rate if a Bupa Health insurance customer is going to one of our Bupa clinics, dental clinics. So, I think that's one of the most important things and because you can look at the product and you can say it's commoditised or you can say what's different about Bupa Health insurance? What do I get from that, that I don't get at other health insurers? And that's the value differentiation and why? You know, we've just reported recently the 9th consecutive market share quarter of growth, right? That's huge, right? I remember when we lost the number one position when I was working at Medibank. So yeah, it’s amazing what the team have done to turn that around over the last sort of nine quarters, but I think that's one of the things that the customers are actually seeing what we're offering as a product but obviously we've got so much more to give through the Savannah period.
Nigel:
So, we've got the Savannah, everybody knows it’s 100 million customers, 100 NPS, 100% data density, but three emblematics really sitting, underpinning the Savannah strategy. So that's Genomics, AI, and Mental Health. So, I know you've got big plans for all of those, and I think it'd be worth talking through each one of them, Nick, if you don't mind. So, could you tell us a bit about genomics? So just for everybody, genomics is sequencing of the human genome, a big thing in predictive and preventative healthcare. We've been running a big pilot in the UK and Spain, as you've heard in previous podcasts, but now moving into other areas as well across Bupa, but big in Australia. So, can you tell us a bit about what's going with genomics with you?
Nick:
Yeah, genomics I think is super exciting. And again, we'll be the first in the market you know going out with the genomics proposition to our customers. So, I'm looking at genomics in three different ways. So, at the moment we've launched at home reproductive carrier screening. So, this is about making sure and understanding if there's any risk from a childbirth perspective. So, that's not uncommon in Australia. It's funded by Medicare, so the government funded system.
Nigel:
And that’s the genes of one person, the genes of another person coming together. Could that be trouble really for the offspring?
Nick:
And also, if the female or the mother carrying a potential child has any potential risks as well. So, I think it's bringing all of those together. You know we're looking at the three most common genetic tests around that at the moment and it's done via cheek swab, so, it's not invasive, it's quite simple. The next one we're looking at is pharmacogenomics. So, understanding what sort of insights that we would get from the different medications that people are taking to work out whether or not their body reacts differently, you know, takes the medication or just reacts differently or doesn't react at all.
Nigel:
Or could be harmful.
Nick:
Yeah, it could be harmful as well. So, I think that's quite exciting. We're trialling that now in some of our aged care homes. You know we're coming to launch that now and go to market with that one. But I actually think what we're learning from Spain and the UK is that that's actually preventing people going back into hospital from taking the wrong medication. So, you can see that it's actually going to be impactful to people's lives but also impact to the system, you know, and not clogging up the system with cases that don't really need to go to hospital. But I think the third thing and I was quite excited being in the UK a couple of weeks ago, but I've had my bloods taken in the UK, I know they’ve probably crossed the waters to go to Spain to get my genomes, my whole genome sequencing done, but we're launching that I think in September from an Aussie perspective. But what's good about the Aussie genome programme that we're running is, it’s all localised.
Nigel:
I was going to ask you that. I've had mine done - I've said in the previous podcast. The bloods taken, then it's separated by our labs here in Spain, and then it goes to a specialist really to sequence the DNA, I think in Spain, and then you get the report. But you're doing something more localised in Australia?
Nick:
Yeah, we've got a couple of partners over in Oz. I think one of the things was the time lag between sending the bloods offshore, coming back again was a long time. And I think it still takes three months now. So, we're going to hopefully do that within a month in Australia, but also capturing the data and keeping it within the Australian borders is probably something that I was a little bit precious about. And so, I'm quite excited. We've got a goal of about 16,000 genome tests that we're going to do this year. So that makes us need to get to market which we're building propositions and go to market strategies at the moment, but it's all up and live and we've got the websites going, we just need the volume now so it's quite exciting.
Nigel:
Game changer, game changer in healthcare. Thank you, Nick. Second one is AI. So, we are now starting to get moving on this and we heard from the ELA team yesterday actually about how we can extract the data from the PDFs and other unstructured and structured data to make our clinicians do a more fulfilling job but also a better job for customers. What sort of progress are you making in that regard?
Nick:
Yeah, we're not dissimilar to the ELA programme. We've got an external piece of software called Lyrebird, but it's essentially doing the same thing. So, transcribing the verbal communications between the patient and the GP, putting it into text then uploading it into our sort of our data warehouse. So, and that's quite exciting and what we've got is some amazing feedback from the clinicians that they can actually spend more time being a doctor as opposed to.
Nigel:
What they were trained to do.
Nick:
What they were trained to do.
Nigel:
Instead of admin.
Nick:
And as we know that the sort of 15/16 minute consults, you know, and it must be quite depressing spending all of the time scribing as opposed to focusing on the needs of your patients. So, we plan to have that rolled out across our health centres by the end of the year. I think we're two or three clinics in at the moment, we’ll go from the health centres into the optical and the dental business as well. So, I think that will be a game changer for even those businesses and the clinicians that work, you know, in the dental and optical business. So, I think that's a great one from a Lyrebird perspective.
We're also taking all the PDF forms, digitising them, and ultimately getting more clinical data with respect to understanding our customers better. So, come back to that, you know, the ultimate goal of the personalised health plan, we'll understand our customers better from all of, the PDF data is really, really rich, right? And when you go, and you fill out all those forms and you hate filling out those forms. But there's a lot of really interesting information about your personal age, demographic, health requirements and these sorts of things that go to then you know what sort of preventative nudges or wellbeing activities could we push to those customers to make sure that they're doing the best for their health? I think that the PDF forms are great, Lyrebird’s great from a clinical perspective. But we're also using AI in the call centres, so Kate Williams and the team have really embraced it. They're getting about 40% efficiency out of the call centres, but this is going from digitising some of the messaging that we've got, so taking some of the call messaging from the queues of the normal, you know that would normally go to a human from an a interactive perspective and dealing with it from a digital perspective.
Nigel:
These will be presumably things like policy queries and things like that. Stuff that a machine can do just as well.
Nick:
That’s probably the third one, you know not having huge databases that people have to trawl through to understand, hey, Nige, what's your policy? What's the background? How many claims have you had? So, we've put a lot of AI tools in place to actually make that so much faster. So, the actual call centre, you know, staff member can really spend the time understanding because they've got the information at their fingertips. So, they can understand what the customer’s needs are, the customer experience is going to be so much better, NPS will be higher, they'll feel like they've been sort of prioritised and personalised. So, you know, I see that as another game changer but It's simple stuff, you know, when you think about AI, but it's such a manual process otherwise.
Nigel:
And it's a bit like the clinicians - it's more fulfilling for our people to instead of dealing with a policy query, you might be helping someone who's got cancer or something like that and really giving them the empathy and the support that they need instead of trawling through information that’s difficult to access, and let the machine do that.
Nick:
And I see from our Pulse survey, one of the questions that we always get is the tools that we've got to enable our employees. But I think this is demonstrating some of the tools that we're building to make everyone's lives a lot better and you know the jobs so much more satisfactory as well.
Nigel:
So, the third area is mental health. Our brand is Mindplace. We're committed to opening 200 mental health clinics in the next three years across the world, changing the face of how mental health support is delivered. You guys are well on the way on this one, I know. Could you tell us a little bit about, you know, Mindplace and what sort of things you're doing there? I think it's a mixture of acquiring and building across the different regions of different states in Australia.
Nick:
Yeah, I think that the ultimate goal for us is to have 60 standalone mental health clinics. You know what we might also do is supplement some of those mental health clinics in our GP practices as well - so have a room or two. We've just opened another health centre in June in Melbourne and that's going to have mental health facilities in that as well. We launched our first standalone mental health clinic in George Street in Sydney, which the board came to in May and that's super exciting. So, we're going to have three by the end of June with the goal of having 10 at the end of this year, 30 by the end of 2026, and the 60 by the end of 2027. But the team are super motivated, it’s such a great cause and I think you know, hats off to Iñaki from an emblematic perspective because this one is, one that's going to make such a difference to people's lives. I think in Australia we quote that, you know, there's 50% of the population will know or be impacted by a mental health circumstance in their life. But the one difference about Oz is, which is a little bit unfortunate, it's not funded as an outpatient as part of your outpatient product with respect to health insurance, it's only really funded if you're an inpatient, you know, mental health customer.
Nigel:
Referred to? You’ve got a referral.
Nick:
So, I think that's the difference between say, the UK, Spain, and Oz is that you know, we don't fund much from a mental health perspective. So I was even with the Minister, you know, just recently going, what's the opportunity to change the PHI product to open it up for more outpatient claims with respect to mental health? And that would be a massive game changer as well if we could get that done.
Nigel:
So mental health, we know there's a pandemic out there of mental health globally, we know it's an issue everywhere. For Australia, I think the funding of it might be a bit of a challenge?
Nick:
Yeah, currently Nige, we fund about $11 million of our $7 billion claims line goes to mental health and that's mental health inpatient, in hospital. So, a little bit different from the UK and Spain where though the HI product or the health insurance product is funding outpatient claims for mental health, so not dissimilar to dental in Oz. You know you can drive volume and traffic to your dental clinics. It's different for us from a mental health perspective because we're not paying the claim from the health insurance product. So, it's something that I would love to get into the reform agenda with government so we could look at how we would enhance the product to put more outpatient claim funding into the health insurance product.
Nigel:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. A lot of sense. Last thing, well, not quite the last thing, Blua has been another huge focus I know for you and the team. You've made enormous progress here from really a standing start. How's it going?
Nick:
So, Blua, you know it's one of our top five priorities for 2025. You know we talk about five priorities, and this is part of the Savannah27 launch, but you know Blua I would have said was, you know, we call it 65% of the importance of the top five priorities. The others being health centres, mental health, data and digital, and also performance optimisation. But Blua, we're calling it Blua 2.0. So, this is a standalone app that's being built outside of the health insurance, My Bupa app. And that's what's different this year because we're not going to be able to go after 100 million customers if it's all embedded within the health insurance app and you have to have a health insurance customer number to have access to it. And as you know, Australia, 27 million people, 55% penetration - there’s not much to go after from a health insurance perspective if you're looking to drive
Nigel:
Pure market share?
Nick:
100%. So, we're building this app outside of the My Bupa app that then gives us access to the rest of the Australians, but also different share of wallets from the rest of the Australians that might be also insured from a My Bupa or a health insurance perspective as well. But we're now using that to take it to New Zealand. So, the foundations of the new Blua app allows us to take it to aged care, both in Oz and New Zealand. But also, you know, we're offering a lot more things with a lot more functionality and the speed to market as a result of newer technology and sort of not having the legacy rails and foundations of the old platforms, you know, I'm super excited. We're due to launch this in September. A lot of healthy habits, wearables, data for simple things like virtual consults will all be part of the initial launch. Hong Kong has done this quite well.
Nigel:
Very well, very well.
Nick:
You would have seen this in the CEC visit last year, but their app is now very integrated with a QHMS build business.
Nigel
It's quite sophisticated as well and what it can do.
Nick:
Yeah, a lot. From facial AI, health check type things just from looking at your phone. But you know what's great that Fiona [Harris] and the team have done is making sure that they've collapsed the My Bupa app and they've got all of their health insurance customers now going to Blua. So this is where we can see the scale and the connectedness of their, you know, the connected care ambition and we can see it in the BPC’s each month, how much of their claims are now going into their Health Services business as a result of the Blua app as well?
Nigel:
I think one of the thing’s Bupa is learning to become as a multinational and what you guys amongst many other things bring to the table is, just for the listeners, most of Bupa’s business is B2C, you know business to sorry, business to business I should say. Most of your business is business to consumer and that consumer lens that you're bringing, that mass market, you know, 4/5 million customers, I think the rest of it was learning from you guys about how to do that, that build that muscle about how to directly sell to people- as opposed to through corporates and I think that's a really good learning for the rest of us.
Nick:
Yeah, I think it's such a different market, but you know, the Australian market, it's different because it's community rating, I mean it's not risk rating. So, everyone has the same policy at the same price. And there's tax incentives, so when you fill out your tax return, you get some sort of benefit from having a health insurance product as opposed to relying on the system, the government system. So, I think that's different from the rest of the world. But what we're learning from a Group perspective, especially the UK and Bupa Well+, is how do you actually take products to the corporates where we've not really played in that space before? So yeah, one of our big launches later on this year is around a corporate and wellbeing product. So, hopefully leveraging off the big corporate dollars for making sure that the wellbeing of their staff is a lot better but also leveraging the Blua app and the products associated with that. And I think one of the great things that we've done through mobility within Bupa is to send Chris Carroll across to the UK, that’s got extensive experience.
Nigel:
Yeah, thanks for that. Thanks for that. He’s landed reasonably well to be honest with you. He’s a big fella.
Nick
I think Chris has taken his retail experience to the UK and obviously hopefully you'll benefit from his knowledge, but we’ll benefit from the interactions that we're having back with Chris on what he's learning that we can apply back into our business as well.
Nigel:
Yeah, he's also brought a lot of RM Williams boots with him as well, I've noticed.
Nick:
He does like them!
Nigel:
So look, second half of 2025 just upon us now as we enter the second half of the year. What else are you looking forward to Nick? As if you didn't have enough on!
Nick:
For me, it's delivering on probably the top five priorities. We have to get Blua into market, right? So that's September. The ambition also is to have Healthy Cities sitting in the Blua app which will mean that we've got a lot more engagement and we're looking to do Healthy Cities in October. So, that's going to be a big milestone.
Nigel:
Oh, you're singing my tune.
Nick:
From us, obviously we smashed the targets last year with two billion steps. We hope to outdo that this year.
Nigel:
Yep.
Nick:
We're at 23 health centres. We’ve got to get to 40, is the ambition. So yeah, a lot of work to do in the second half of the year. Genomics we spoke about, but we're not getting enough volume. Into both, the mental health, the health centres, and genomics, you know, the propositions and the go to market approach. So, I'm looking forward to scaling that in the second half of the year, which is really, really important. And I think we've got a CEC visit in New Zealand. So, I can't not recognise that we're looking forward to having you guys in New Zealand in October this year as well.
Nigel:
Looking forward to being there with you, Pedro [Sanchez] and the rest of the team.
Nick:
Yeah, we were over in New Zealand last week and you know Pedro [Sanchez] and the team are so excited about hosting. I don't think I'm making this up, but I don't think the CEC’s ever been there as a group, not in my time. So, I know the guys will be super excited. They'll be a bit of an All Blacks theme. So, that’ll be exciting as well. But I think, Nige, at the end of the day, we've got really clear view of what we need to deliver. You know that there's not really the cloud of what does Savannah mean anymore, which it would have been a little bit this time last year. So we've just got to knuckle down and deliver on our ambition. But you know, everyone's up for it. Everyone's super excited about it and we know where we’re heading.
Nigel:
Thank you, Nick. Thanks for joining me today on the podcast. It's been great to have you on - so much going on in APAC and so much more to come.
Nick:
Thank you, thank you for having me once again, Nige.
Nigel:
Everybody, thank you for listening. I hope you find the conversation useful. If you have any questions or comments as usual, just e-mail us on runningelephant@bupa.com. Bye for now!