Southern Cross Health Society’s BeingWell app has taken home Bronze in the Interactive Applications category at the Best Design Awards, a win described as a “significant achievement” given the app’s relatively short time on the market.

BeingWell launched in May of this year, and has since signed on a steady stream of corporate clients and individual policyholders. It assesses four key areas of health, delivers measurable objectives and KPIs and provides HR departments with aggregated data scores, allowing businesses to tailor the offering to their employees.

“We launched the programme earlier this year, and we now have several thousand people enrolled,” said Southern Cross Health Society chief marketing officer Chris Watney. “We were very pleased to win Bronze in the Interactive Applications category of the Best Design Awards. This isn’t too bad for an insurer, given the competition we were up against!

“We’ve had some great feedback from our corporate clients, especially with regards to the ease of the onboarding,” he explained. “The app is based around health assessment, goal setting, team challenges and other such ideas, and clients can then use the data that comes out of that to really understand the health of their staff population, and use it to plan targeted programmes.”

There are currently four aspects to the app – think, eat, sleep and move. Employees are asked to fill out a lifestyle survey which gives them an overall BeingWell score, and they can then set goals and record their progress to improve the score.

“The feedback that we’ve been getting has been really exciting, as it means that we can make a real difference to businesses and how they think about the health of their staff,” Watney said.

“What we want to do now is broaden that offering to include things like financial wellbeing and self-sufficiency. We’ve also been thinking about how to challenge organisations, perhaps even pit some of them against each other in a constructive and fun environment.

“It’s really great to have been recognised for the design of the app, as the design is a crucial part of how people interact with it.”