What is the one thing you can do today to increase the number of healthy years you have remaining?

Earlier this week we launched our Healthy Futures Research, which quantifies the widening gap between lifespan and healthspan (the number of years lived in good health), and includes a pioneering algorithm developed in collaboration with RAND Europe that gives individuals their personal healthspan. This enables anyone to understand how their lifestyle choices impact both their length and quality of life, and how to take actions that will maximise the number of years that they spend in good health in the future.

The launch event was hosted by author, anthropologist and Financial Times columnist, Gillian Tett, with fascinating insights from speakers including historian and best-selling author Professor Yuval Noah Harari; behavioural decision-making expert, Professor Hal Hershfield; WW International CEO, Mindy Grossman; co-founder of Strava, Mark Gainey; CEO OF Reinsurance at Swiss Re, Moses Ojeisekhoba; and healthy longevity expert and author, Sergey Young.    

We delved into issues including the need to think beyond just lifespan, given people are living longer but in poorer health (our analysis found a 15% average increase since 1990 in the number of years people will spend in ill health over their lifetimes - approximately 18% of the average lifespan); and the centrality of behaviour to this, given that diseases of lifestyle lead to 60% of mortality globally and the behaviours driving these conditions are highly modifiable (given the right interventions). While the world spends 10% of GDP on healthcare delivery, only 5% goes towards prevention services. This is a massive opportunity - reducing the disease burden by just 10% through more preventive policies and individual-level behaviour change could prevent up to 93 million healthy years of life being lost globally each year.

With all this in mind, we asked ourselves, ‘What if we could further science by accurately predicting an individual’s unique number of years spent in good health, and the next best actions they can take today to extend it?’

The result is the world’s first healthspan predicting algorithm, that builds on research done by Vitality in collaboration with RAND Europe on the relationship between lifestyle choices, pre-existing conditions and mortality. The Healthy Futures algorithm leverages the largest source of risk-disease outcomes data in the world - IHME’s Global Burden of Disease – comprising more than 200 causes of death, more than 300 diseases and injuries and 84 risk factors. The data has been augmented with Discovery data comprising millions of life-years to allow for a new and clinically accurate set of questions. In addition, this healthspan prediction tool incorporates insights from resonance studies being conducted with Professor Hal Hershfield at the University of California, Los Angeles, which explores how to build intrinsic motivation by speaking to people about their risks in a way they understand and that resonates with them. 

The practical application of this algorithm – bringing the science to people’s fingertips – is the Vitality Healthy Futures Calculator, which analyses an individual’s unique biometrics and communication preferences to provide them with a forecast of five key health metrics:

1. Their lifespan
2. Their healthspan
3. The number of effective sick years they will have
4. The breakdown of likely diseases that will make up these years
5. The most important next step or behaviour they can change to increase their healthspan

The potential of this algorithm is profound. The differences between very healthy and unhealthy individuals is stark – in many cases, completing the recommended action results in healthspan being doubled, while the percentage of life spent in illness is more than halved.  

Beyond individuals, this has implications for governments and healthcare systems dealing with growing healthcare burdens; employers dealing with an increasingly unhealthy and unproductive workforce; and insurers who need to be incentivising better future health.

Try the Vitality Healthy Futures calculator for yourself on https://vitality.international/, it will be available to the public for a limited time, with a view to integrating it into Vitality's global member platform in the coming months.

You can also watch a recording of the Healthy Futures launch event under the ‘On Demand’ tab on: https://vitality.howler.co.za/GVN21