Loyalty Cards: Saving money - and lives too?

Transactional data creates a detailed and valuable story of our lives

I love this. It's a really interesting piece about how smart use of personal data can make a real difference to people's outcomes with life threatening diseases like ovarian cancer. The loyalty card becomes an effective diagnostic aid - that's such a simple concept and potentially so valuable. There's a lot of loyalty cards out there after all.

I've also worked a lot in the world of financial services over the years and one of the things that has always struck me about our transactional data is how much of our story of life it tells if you look into it with intelligence. Financial transaction is a constant and a necessity in our lives - it is part of who we are and our data footprint. This makes it an incredibly powerful and potentially useful asset to us across all aspects of life.

This really chimes with the Future of Healthcare study we are sharing at the moment. It’s a great example of using data to help earlier and better clinical decision making and also takes us into one of the other key forces of change - the need for new partnerships and attitudes towards personal data. At the moment, the potential of our transactional data as a marker of our health and well being lies in the hands of our favourite supermarket - or bank. To turn these exciting research findings into a real impact on people’s health outcomes in the future we need to liberate the data - to make sure it is shared with the right people with the right motivations and at the right time. It’s a great and seemingly simple opportunity, there will no doubt be a few devils lurking in the detail but its still an exciting glimpse into the power of personal data to transform healthcare.