News

Southern Cross Health Society to relaunch its corporate wellbeing

Monday , 17 October 2016 by Alistair Gray

New Zealand’s largest health insurer Southern Cross Health Society has signed an agreement to implement the pilot phase of dacadoo’s award-winning Health Score Platform as the foundation to its new workplace wellbeing proposition.

Southern Cross Health Society will leverage its strength in the corporate health insurance market to launch a comprehensive suite of workplace wellbeing services at its inaugural wellbeing conference in early November. The service will be offered to selected businesses to complement Southern Cross’ health insurance products which are already made available to New Zealand workers and their families through more than 4,000 workplace health insurance schemes across the country.

Chris Watney, head of product and marketing at Southern Cross Health Society says, “workplace wellbeing is an area that’s seeing huge growth all around the world. Our business clients are telling us that they are aware of the opportunity that they have to support their employees’ wellbeing, but many just don’t know where to start.”

In a recent survey conducted by the insurer, just under half of New Zealand businesses (48%) that responded to the survey said they had implemented some form of health and wellbeing initiatives to support staff in their companies, yet only 40% of them had worked with specialist providers to offer those initiatives.

Southern Cross will partner with wellness experts to offer a suite of services, ranging from free access to health and wellness content designed to help businesses get a simple wellbeing programme up and running, through to bespoke solutions that meet the specific requirements of individual businesses. By placing the dacadoo platform at the heart of its offering, Southern Cross will be able to help businesses truly understand the specific challenges faced by their employees and seek to create innovative solutions to overcome them.

Digital platforms have changed the nature of wellbeing programmes for small, medium and large companies. Says Watney: “we want to enable our clients and their employees to understand and take control of their personal wellbeing by connecting to a wide range of wearables and other related apps. By implementing the dacadoo Health Score platform we will be offering one of the most innovative, digital wellbeing solutions in the New Zealand market.”

The Swiss company dacadoo ag develops and operates a digital, mobile health engagement solution that helps people actively manage their health in an easy and fun way. The company applies motivational techniques from online games, collaborative features from social networks and personalised feedback to engage people to remain active.

Peter Ohnemus, founder and CEO of dacadoo commented: “We’re very proud to collaborate with Southern Cross in New Zealand as they take a very advanced and innovative approach to the corporate wellbeing opportunity. We look forward to building the digital health market together”.