An insurer signs a polished digital health platform in the spring. The demo was excellent and the board was pleased. By the next renewal the conversation has changed: engagement fell off a cliff at week six, and the claims data never moved. Nobody bought a bad product. They bought the wrong thing, and found out a year too late.
That pattern is avoidable. The choice comes down to five questions, and one of them predicts far more than the rest.
- Does the programme actually hold members past the drop-off point?
- Are you buying software, delivery, or both?
- What happens to your cost as the programme scales?
- What does each certification actually cover?
- Can the partner show evidence you can verify?
The rest of this guide takes them one at a time.
1. Does it actually hold people? (the one most insurers ask last)
This is the question that matters most, and it usually comes up last. A member who stops opening the app in week six has had an onboarding experience, not a programme, and no avoided claim ever appears on your books.
It is not a soft metric. Of the roughly £10.7 billion the NHS spends on diabetes each year, about £6.2 billion goes on complications rather than on diagnosis or routine care, according to Diabetes UK. Complications build quietly in the months between appointments, which is the exact window a digital programme is meant to cover. A programme that cannot hold a member through that window never touches the part of the cost that hurts.
What to ask a prospective partner:
- How do you sustain engagement past the first month?
- Show me the shape of the drop-off curve at month twelve, not the sign-up figure at week one.
2. Are you buying software, delivery, or both?
The most common opening question our commercial team hears from prospects is a version of *"is this software only, or do you also deliver the care?"* It is the right instinct, because the answer changes everything about what your team has to build.
Partners tend to fall into three models:
- Platform only. You get the technology and staff the clinical work yourself.
- Delivery included. The partner runs the care with its own qualified professionals.
- Both, as one service, which is how Liva is set up, so you can take the technology and the care together or separately.
None is automatically right. The failure is not noticing which one you signed, then finding the gap once members are enrolled. Make the partner state plainly which parts they own and which land back on you.
3. What happens to your cost as it scales?
A digital partner earns its place by supporting more members without a matching rise in people and admin. So put it flatly: if serving twice the members costs you close to twice as much to run, the model is doing very little for you.
Where a good partner absorbs volume is the work between appointments, the messaging and monitoring that would otherwise land on a clinician's desk. Ask for the commercial model in writing and check how it is priced, whether per member, per programme or per outcome, so you can see how the cost curve bends. Our framework for measuring prevention ROI works through the maths.
4. Read one certification in full, and ignore the logo wall
A slide covered in compliance badges tells you less than one certification read properly. Pick the one that matters for your obligations and go deep.
DTAC, for example, is the NHS assessment standard for whether a digital health technology is safe, secure and clinically sound. A partner that holds it has passed a real external check rather than a self-assessment. Liva is DTAC certified and a registered CQC provider for delivery of weight management programmes in England.
For any certification a partner claims, ask:
- What does it actually cover, in practice?
- When was it last audited?
- Does the data handling match our own retention rules?
5. Ask for evidence you can verify
Claims are cheap in this market. Look for named programmes with published outcomes, and ask whether results have been reproduced at scale or shown once in a favourable pilot. A partner that leads with a single flattering number, and cannot point to anything you can check, is telling you something.
How Liva approaches insurer partnerships
Liva was built as three connected parts: a configurable platform, evidence-based programmes, and a managed delivery service staffed by qualified health professionals. For an insurer that means the technology and the care can arrive together or separately, depending on what you run in house. The design goal across all of it is sustained engagement, because that is the variable that decides whether the rest of the business case holds. You can see how this maps to different buyer types on our who we serve page.
Before you sign, run this checklist
- You have seen the month-twelve engagement curve, beyond the sign-up figure
- You know exactly which parts are software and which are delivery
- The commercial model shows how cost behaves as you scale
- You have read the key certification in full and checked the audit date
- The partner has evidence you can independently verify
