AXA Health: Enhancing Private Medical Insurance Proposition

AXA Health is a leading provider of healthcare services, offering a range of medical insurance and health solutions to individuals and businesses.

With a focus on promoting wellness and improving access to healthcare resources, AXA Health aims to empower individuals to take control of their health journey.

Kerv Digital supported AXA Health to revolutionise healthcare solutions for customers through self-service mobile app technology.

Given that over 5% of Google searches are healthcare-related, and the journey for healthcare often begins online, AXA Health recognised that there was a demand for clear and easily accessible healthcare resources that would support individuals to manage their own health.

Their idea was to create a health and wellbeing app that offered access to a variety of expert-led programmes in areas such as sleep, mindfulness and fitness; along with a suite of self-care services, including health age calculators and mental health assessments.

The app would support their wellbeing proposition for corporate clients, and open new market opportunities for individuals beyond just private medical insurance.

Delivering quality products to market fast requires a specialist delivery environment and AXA Health sought an agile delivery partner to streamline processes and swiftly deliver a user-focused app to meet market demands.

Kerv Digital partnered with AXA Health to bring their vision to life, by providing the technical and product expertise needed to turn their innovative idea into a go-to market solution.

To achieve this, Kerv Digital:

• Built out a sustainable product roadmap that included dependency mapping, leadership alignment, and agile bootcamps, to get teams aligned with new ways of working.
• Built the IOS and Android version of the app in parallel in short, continuous, iterations to allow for new features to be developed in response to feedback, dependencies, and directional change.  Reducing CI/CD bottleneck and apply focussed enhancements helped to reduce build times by 80% from initial performance.
• Provided access to real-time user behaviour by building in data analytics for fast, early feedback.
• Built a vertical slice through a simple user journey to discover infrastructure and security constraints, and ensure the right tools and technology were applied from the start to meet compliance requirements.
• Built a cloud-first platform framework that fitted with the client’s existing infrastructure model and contained easily reusable patterns to enable them to reuse the framework for future projects.
• Introduced code analysis tools to drive up quality and security metrics.
• Introduced team guilds to share best-practice, and threat-modelling workshops to maintain security awareness.

We’ve seen a huge internal impact, and we feel confident that it’s the right way of working. We have created a culture of change and have pivoted the way we create a product. We’ve learnt a lot about designing a product with a customer, rather than for a customer.

Calvin Mills, Tech Lead, AXA Health

The overall approach enabled delivery of the mobile app at scale, as well as a platform framework that could be easily reused by the client for future projects.

Exceptional delivery speed

The first iteration of the wellbeing app was delivered within 6 months of the project start date, and the product was available to download after just 12 months. This incredible step change was achieved through challenging existing approaches and embedding agile ways of working in the internal AXA Health team.

Positioned to scale 

Following a successful initial pilot launch and positive feedback from a number of large corporate organisations, AXA Health are well positioned to continue enhancing the product in the run up to a broader market launch.

Enabling business firsts 

Through partnering with Kerv Digital, AXA Health were able to launch the app to market on schedule, making it the first app developed by AXA Health in the whole of the UK.