4 minute read
What’s your score?
Romano Toscano, CEO and Founder of MyLifeKit discusses the launch of VioScore
As the world takes stock following the devastating impact of COVID-19, MyLifeKit Founder Romano Toscano believes a holistic overview of a person’s lifestyle wellbeing is essential. MyLifeKit’s new venture VioScore hopes to provide just that via a numerical expression to identify risk.
“Our vision is to use accessible information and technology to create a ‘VioScore’ Society, leading to better lives for everyone,” says Toscano.
VioScore has been created to provide individuals with an overview of, notably, their insurability derived from information gathered about their lifestyle choices. Since 1979, financial decisions have been based upon a credit score that in Toscano’s view doesn’t reflect the full reality.
“This limited view on a person’s insurability is unfair, and o en based on only partial information of an individual’s life,” he says. He feels that the current system is unable to provide a comprehensive risk profile of one’s lifestyle and therefore leads to disadvantageous insurance policies and biased financial restrictions.
A comprehensive score
VioScore will merge health-related data and credit-related data to o er users a numerical expression of their life based on their physiological needs, health, and financial wellbeing. VioScore will evaluate potential risks posed by unhealthy lifestyles and present solutions to improve it.
The service also has applications within the healthcare sector by allowing providing healthcare professionals deeper insight into a patient’s lifestyle. It can also be applied in the insurance and banking sector, to help consumers with better access to credit and insurance coverage, as enabled by a positive VioScore, similar to the way in which traditional credit scores usually work.
Romano Toscano CEO & Founder MyLifeKit
More than 5m UK citizens have ‘thin’ or non-existent credit scores and almost a third of them are under 30. Those who have little to no history of handling credit are classed as unscorable or rejectable. Having a sparse record is no reflection of a consumer’s financial situation or risk. Furthermore, a bad credit score can impact an individual’s insurability indefinitely.
VioScore for healthcare
VioScore regularly calculates an individual’s score based on many aspects such as health, credit, surrounding factors, environmental aspects, global trends and other factors, supported by data inputs and artificial intelligence. The result will allow people to take control of their life situation by comparing their score to benchmarks and by providing individual advice on how to improve the score and henceforth improve their lives.
Collaboration with general practitioners will allow seamless VioScore sharing between patients and healthcare providers, leading to greater insight into patients’ lives allowing general practitioners to provide better health care, early issue identification, and preventative medicine recommendations.
It will lead to an improvement in job satisfaction by enabling general practitioners to practise at the top of their licence. It will also create an improvement in the economics, e iciency, and e ectiveness of medical care processes, leading to a healthier patient base and increasing patient retention. VioScore can help reduce the imbalance between the demand for, and capacity in, general practice.
Working with inhouse experienced counsel to provide the best GDPR and data protection, “VioScore will revolutionise the decision-making process for insurance firms,” states Toscano. “For example, in the USA it is not allowed to take medical data into a credit decision. We provide the indicators but for the USA we wouldn’t want to give that data away. The control should always be with the client- they should be the ultimate controller of their data. We call it ‘giving AI back to the people’.”
So, what’s the score?
With the rise in popularity of monitoring services such as fitness apps and smart technologies, enriched data can be accessed to create a complete overview of an individual’s lifestyle.
A recent report by IQVIA has found that there are more than 350,000 digital health apps available, with over 90,000 being introduced in 2021 alone. Across the pond, the US predicts there will be over 86 million users of health and fitness apps this year, and more than 100 million active Apple Watch users.
These statistics show the willingness of people to keep track of their wellness through health, fitness, and financial monitoring. “Numerical signifiers have surged in popularity in recent years, and yet there is no o ering which combines credit and health analysis into one simple score. VioScore will answer that need” says Toscano.
The level of data available through a combination of these mobile apps will allow VioScore to create a profile of a user’s lifestyle, based upon their behaviours. This user profile will be translated into a number, which will replace the credit score with a more fair, reliable, and well-rounded risk analysis of an individual’s habits. This number, in turn, will provide banks, insurance companies, mortgage brokers and comparison sites a ‘smart’ and accurate dataset reflective of multidimensional variables which are not currently considered.
By using VioScore, individuals will be able to check in on their lifestyle wellness as easily as they do their daily step count or sleep patterns. Essentially, users will receive benefits such as insurance premiums and financial deals, and the way an individual’s financial risk profile is calculated will be reformed. “Our product will bring multiple benefits, not only in boosting personal health awareness, but also flagging potentially unhealthy lifestyles, thus bringing a revolutionary approach to medical prevention, by spotting , and even catching diseases and life-threatening illnesses ahead,” says Toscano.
“An individual’s credit score starts at the moment of application for credit. VioScore starts when you are born. It should be a holistic overview of someone’s life.”
