Bupa: Building a cloud-first digital platform for the future of healthcare

Consumer expectations of healthcare have changed. Accustomed to using digital products and services in other walks of life, people now rightly demand a similar experience with their healthcare. At Bupa, we’re committed to delivering on those desires, which is why we are working with Google Cloud to build our new, cloud-first digital customer platform. 

Driven by our ambition to be the world’s most customer-centric healthcare company, our Bupa Blua experience provides digital access to care when needed, and the tools to enable customers to be proactive with their health. Using Google Cloud technology, we are expanding the technical foundations to power Blua, allowing us to develop innovative ways to improve our customers’ wellbeing, reduce the cost of healthcare, and deliver the highly personalized experience our customers expect.

Prescribing the right architecture for digital innovation

We are building from a position of strength. Bupa boasts a powerful health database, and with our Bupa app we already offer our customers a wide range of digital services. However, our legacy infrastructure was restricting our ability to innovate quickly. We knew that with the right cloud infrastructure and a robust data ecosystem, we could build on our firm foundation to deliver truly transformative care for our customers. 

Google Cloud was the obvious choice. Not only for its market-leading data analytics solutions, AI expertise, and healthcare-specific APIs, but also for its broader commitment to healthcare innovation across Alphabet’s subsidiaries. 

The lifeblood of personalized care

At the heart of our new technical platform will be data, and Google Cloud’s market-leading data solutions will be essential in helping us make full use of it, giving us deeper insights into our customers’ needs and preferences. 

Connecting all our data and insights with Google Cloud’s advanced AI and machine learning solutions will allow us to deliver a range of benefits for our customers, stakeholders, and the business while ensuring the utmost levels of privacy and transparency. 

Among the new services include connecting customers to expert healthcare day or night with digital general practitioner (GP) services; the ability to check symptoms in seconds using our app; faster, more convenient, and cost-effective healthcare services; and joined-up healthcare across our health provision and insurance businesses for better outcomes for our customers. 

Taking the first steps towards a healthier future

We are just scratching the surface of the power of our partnership, but we’re already starting to address key questions around how to build and deliver the most effective platform. How do we provide more sophisticated services to our customers at the same time as improving ease of use? And, to consider one specific scenario, how can we capture and connect health data for a customer, such as someone requiring cancer treatment, not only to deliver better treatment but also to improve early detection and prevent the cancer from spreading and becoming more serious? 

With Bupa’s healthcare expertise and Google Cloud’s infrastructure and technical excellence, we will answer these questions — and many more like them — as we seek to deliver highly personalized and seamless customer interactions across all channels and improve healthcare outcomes for our members. Our journey with Google Cloud is just beginning. The benefits for Bupa in the UK and our millions of customers will be felt for years to come.