Bupa consolidates customer data for predictive healthcare push

Bupa has consolidated about 90 per cent of its customer and health data onto a single Databricks-powered platform to support more personalised and predictive healthcare, iTnews reported on September 28, 2026.

The report said the healthcare and insurance company is using the unified data view as part of its Connected Care strategy, which aims to personalise healthcare before, during and after a customer sees a clinician. iTnews attributed the detail to Bupa chief data officer Ed Falconer, who said personalisation at Bupa went beyond marketing and targeting, and was focused on health management and helping customers find the right clinician at the right time.

According to the iTnews report, Bupa’s data consolidation followed a period in which acquisition-led growth had left customers connected to multiple data services. Falconer and his team have since consolidated the company’s data onto a single Databricks-powered platform, creating what he described as a single source of information and health data for joined-up care.

The report said Bupa’s personalisation team now uses about 1500 data features from the platform to support decisioning across millions of customer touchpoints each year. It also said Bupa’s data and analytics processes are now delivering outcomes more than eight times faster than three years ago, while many data tasks have moved from weekly to daily delivery.

Databricks, in a customer story posted to its community site on August 7, 2026, also said Bupa Australia was bringing more than 90 per cent of its business and customer data onto one governed platform using Databricks and Unity Catalogue. That vendor-published account described the platform as a foundation for analytics, machine learning and personalisation, and quoted Falconer as saying Databricks gave Bupa “a single source of truth for customer centricity”.

iTnews previously reported on April 2, 2025 that Bupa wanted to create a “digital health twin” for every customer to support preventative and customer-centric conversations and care programs. In the September 2026 report, Falconer said Bupa was still exploring digital representations of customers, with health information presented differently depending on whether it was being used by a customer, clinician or the business.

Artificial intelligence is expected to have a growing role in Bupa’s Connected Care work, according to the September iTnews report. Falconer described one focus area as using AI to document health plans after consultations so they are more accessible to customers.

However, the report said Bupa remained cautious about agentic AI in health. Falconer said the company saw value in controlled back-office use cases, but was not using agentic AI in the health sphere at this point. He said privacy, governance and customer consent would remain foundational as Bupa expands its use of predictive models and AI across sensitive health data.