Dinesh Govender wants you to sleep better tonight. The energetic CEO of Discovery Vitality — the part of the corporate behemoth that incentivises you to make better lifestyle choices — is explaining the rationale behind optimising this particular activity over lunch.
We are at Mila, the charming Greek addition to Sandton’s Luxx, which has the advantage of being just a stone’s throw from the Discovery mothership.
Dinesh explains he doesn’t usually do sit-down lunches during the working day, and that he has four meetings coming up after this item on his itinerary. I feel a little wild by comparison, given the very public nature of my lunching habits.
He is making time for me because Discovery has added sleep to nutrition and exercise as one of the key metrics in their preventative health-care model. If you were already struggling every now and then to get a good night’s rest, the data Discovery has collected from the 47-million nights of sleep of more than 105,000 Vitality members may well tip you into permanent insomnia.
Apparently a bad night’s sleep — too little and too disturbed — when compounded over time results in some serious side effects. Think cardiometabolic disease, depression and early mortality.
I sound like an actuary, but basically everything, from your heart and your weight to your blood-sugar levels and your mood, is affected by how well you nod off and how deeply you stay in a somnolent state. One bad night and you are driving like a bozo who’s got a couple of drinks in him — making you 32% more likely to have an accident.
It’s alarming, but they have tech for it, albeit not the kind that may have created the sleep issues one in two Discovery Health members are already contending with (I refer to our smartphones and Netflix here). It’s called the Oura ring, and Discovery have partnered with the US technology company to bring the impressively smart wearable device to South Africa.
I wonder how you actually change people’s behaviour. Do the incentives actually work? Will all the binge-watching and doomscrolling keeping us up all night ever cease?
“My job is to reward positive behaviour change in our members, and I have seen how I’ve changed my own behaviour. Growing up, I was a real couch potato.
“I respond well to incentives. It’s the easiest thing in the world to get someone to work for you, because people react favourably to incentives. In essence, capitalist work is designed around ‘I’ll pay you, and you’ll get an increase and a promotion if you work hard’. So with members we focus first on the soft stop. You have to create the community, bring people in, and then educate them about the importance of [health] screenings, physical activity, nutrition and sleep. But it’s the incentives that get them to really pay attention, because there are so many distractions in life.
“And our members really are changing their behaviour. They went for more than a million screenings in the last year — for blood pressure readings, glucose and cholesterol levels, BMI calculations, mammograms, prostate examinations and colonoscopies. I spend 20% of my time on research and development. I’m always thinking, ‘What’s the next best thing we can do to engage our clients to do the right things for themselves?’“
Dinesh grew up in Chatsworth, Durban. “My parents were teachers. My wife’s parents were teachers. I met my wife in high school, and we both studied engineering in Natal, but then I got bored in my very first year of work. I was making petroleum.“
He joined McKinsey, the international consulting firm, and later went to Harvard Business School to pursue an MBA.
I worry about the impacts of surveillance capitalism, and I express my concerns to Dinesh, given he is incentivising tracking every hour of my day, both waking and sleeping.
“There are certain areas where I think it makes sense to be wary, but in the Discovery space we’ve been obsessed with data for 33 years. We embrace data to inform our business and how we help our clients. And we embrace technology by asking, ‘How can we best use it to do that?’
“So I think for us, as long as we see ourselves as custodians of our members’ data and understand we have to act responsibly, we can use it for good.
“We take our members’ privacy very seriously, and we make sure we use their data only for good. Our members who embrace our technology are healthier.“
This article was first published in Sunday Times Lifestyle.
