Discovery Group CE Adrian Gore has been awarded the 2017 Growth, Innovation and Leadership (GIL) Visionary Innovation Award: Africa 2017.

He received the award from global research and consulting organisation Frost & Sullivan, which, this week, hosted its yearly GIL Africa summit, in Cape Town.

The Discovery CE was recognised for his passion and drive in changing and “disrupting” the healthcare and insurance industries. The 25-year-old Discovery Group will also be launching a bank early next year.

“The breakthrough for us was a simple idea of making people healthier,” said Gore, who explained how using incentives to change behaviour through Discovery Vitality had radically affected the prosperity of the business.

He said he believed there were three trends affecting businesses – social impact, technology, which had been a powerful enabler, and the nature of risk.

Discovery Health deputy CE Ryan Noach told delegates attending the summit that eating and drinking more wisely and exercising helped a great deal to prevent diabetes, heart and lung disease and cancer, which by 2020 would be responsible for 50% of deaths worldwide.

“There’s a massive link between how we behave and mortality. There is a great opportunity for insurers to do something inventive . . . and ultimately change our insurance risk.”

Noach said most people were over-optimistic about their health and deferred getting treatment or mitigating risk. Discovery needed to find a way to change people’s sedentary lifestyles.

“People are quick to access healthcare when they need it, but are slow to undertake long-term benefits. Offering cash-back rewards for eating healthy and exercising makes the benefits of wellness immediate and the arbitrage of price more digestable.”

He said this model had tremendous benefits.

“Highly engaged Vitality members have lower admission rates to hospital, shorter hospital stays compared with other people with the same condition, and their healthcare costs are lower.”

Noach further noted that massive and rising investment in digital healthcare innovation would change healthcare as we know it.

“The whole world is moving to digital. Face-to-face consultations with a doctor may not be how healthcare is going to be in future.”

Digital innovation in healthcare may include big data, artificial intelligence, wearables and mobile health data. There had also been steep spending on electronic health record systems.

“Artificial intelligence will change the way doctors work. Patients will be at the centre of the system, coordinating their own care.”

Noach said one challenge facing most healthcare systems, and especially South Africa’s, was fragmentation in the system.

“A frequent example is when the general practitioner is not talking to the specialist, the specialists don’t talk to each other. Pathology tests are repeated because of poor communication and care coordination doesn’t happen.”

He said Discovery Health was launching a digital healthcare platform to its employees to try to counter this. If successful, it could be rolled out more widely.