How Lifestyle Is Driving the Next Public Health Crisis, and What Payors Can Do

Healthcare systems worldwide, especially in aging, urbanized societies, are already strained by rising rates of lifestyle-related conditions. Cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and mental health disorders are no longer rare or age-dependent. These conditions have become endemic, and their root causes point not just to genetics or individual choices, but to systemic cultural shifts: fast-paced routines, ultra-processed foods, sedentary behavior, digital overload, and fractured care systems.

For payers and insurers, this represents both a growing liability and a transformative opportunity. We have already covered the healthcare shift from reactive to proactive. Traditional, reactive care models, waiting until disease strikes and then reimbursing treatment, are becoming unsustainable in the face of rising costs and deteriorating outcomes. What’s needed now is a pivot: from downstream disease management to upstream risk mitigation.

Recently, we have launched our playbook Before It Hurts: How Data Cuts Costs for Healthcare Payors. And in this blog post, which brings some insights from the playbook, we will outline why this lifestyle crisis matters, what’s fueling it, and how data-driven prevention can shift the balance of power from crisis response to long-term sustainability. This article also serves as a foundation for a broader content series, where we’ll explore individual contributors to this trend, like over-processed foods, medical workforce shortages, mental burnout, and more.The Growing Crisis: A Lifestyle Epidemic

Modern life has become increasingly convenient and simultaneously hazardous. While healthcare and pharmaceutical innovations have progressed rapidly, population-level health is deteriorating.

Lifestyle-related diseases are now the leading cause of death and disability in high-income countries. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), non-communicable diseases (NCDs) account for more than 70% of global deaths annually. These include heart disease, stroke, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes, most of which are preventable.

So what’s fueling this trend?

• Processed and ultra-processed foods: Cheap, convenient, and calorie-dense, these are now the norm in most diets—high in sugar, trans fats, and sodium, but low in nutritional value. Check our blog post about IBS tracking with wearables! 
• Sedentary lifestyles: Remote work, car-centric commuting, and screen-based entertainment have contributed to plummeting physical activity levels.
• Chronic stress and mental overload: Social, financial, and professional pressures—amplified by digital connectivity—are leading to increased anxiety, burnout, and sleep disturbances. We have already covered in detail how to improve our stress management with wearables, check it here! 
• Healthcare access fragmentation: Patients often lack continuity in care, leading to underdiagnosis, polypharmacy, and reactive rather than preventive treatment.

Together, these behaviors and system-level weaknesses are driving up costs, worsening health disparities, and eroding trust in traditional healthcare institutions.

Why It Matters to Payers

For insurers and public payers, lifestyle-driven illness isn’t just a health issue—it’s an economic one. Chronic conditions are among the most expensive to treat, and their prevalence is surging.

Key challenges include:

• Rising claims volume: As chronic illnesses manifest earlier in life, the volume and complexity of claims increase, overwhelming actuarial models.
• High-cost interventions: Treatments for diabetes complications, cardiovascular disease, or advanced cancers often involve costly diagnostics, hospitalizations, and long-term pharmacotherapy.
• Poor ROI from reactive care: Current reimbursement models reward procedures and prescriptions, not prevention. This misalignment discourages proactive investment in behavior-based health improvement.
• Member churn and disengagement: Many prevention initiatives fail due to poor engagement or limited personalization, especially when data is siloed.

However, with the right tools and strategies, these challenges can become opportunities for smarter underwriting, risk segmentation, and preventive program design.

Prevention as a Strategy

Prevention has long been recognized as a high-impact lever for improving public health outcomes and reducing costs—yet historically, it has seen limited implementation across insurance and care systems. This is not due to a lack of awareness but rather the complexity of measuring, personalizing, and validating preventive approaches at scale.

What’s different now? The proliferation of digital health tools, wearable devices, and continuous biometric monitoring has ushered in a new era of real-time, evidence-driven prevention. These innovations enable insurers and payers to:

• Identify early indicators of risk for conditions such as metabolic syndrome, sleep apnea, or chronic stress before clinical symptoms manifest
• Stratify populations by risk level, allowing targeted interventions for high- and medium-risk cohorts
• Track adherence and engagement behaviors in a continuous loop, enabling timely coaching and adjustment
• Measure ROI with precision, by linking preventive actions to tangible reductions in claims, hospital visits, or medication reliance

Moreover, the shift toward integrating wearable data with coaching platforms and longitudinal care pathways positions prevention not as a standalone campaign, but as a scalable strategy that aligns with payers’ operational models. Rather than simply reimbursing downstream procedures, insurers can use real-world data to influence behaviors, personalize care, and reduce long-term liability—all while improving member experience.

Heading Towards Healthier Infrastructure

To fully unlock the potential of lifestyle data and digital prevention, payers must move beyond isolated systems and commit to building a robust, interoperable infrastructure. This shift involves both technological transformation and strategic alignment across departments. It requires a move from reactive claims management to real-time, personalized risk mitigation at scale.

Key pillars include:

• Unified data access: Seamlessly integrate wearable, sensor, and mobile app data across leading ecosystems (Apple, Garmin, Samsung, Oura, etc.) using standardized, secure APIs. Centralizing this information enables consistent data flows, faster onboarding, and meaningful insights across platforms.
• Privacy-first personalization: Implement behavioral nudging systems that honor user consent and data governance best practices. Personalization must go beyond content—it must be timely, contextual, and sensitive to user preferences to drive engagement and build long-term trust.
• Engagement-optimized UX: Partner with digital product teams to co-develop front-end experiences that drive daily interaction. Push notifications, gamified incentives, adaptive goal setting, and accessible dashboards are proven levers to improve user retention in preventive programs.
• Clinical-grade analytics: Leverage validated algorithms and machine learning models that stratify members by risk profile, predict acute events, and surface actionable insights for escalation. This enables targeted coaching, triage, and program adjustments at scale.
• Outcome-based contracting: Evolve reimbursement models to reward long-term health gains. Structure contracts around KPIs such as reduced hospitalizations, improved activity levels, stable HRV metrics, or consistent medication adherence.

At Thryve, we support this vision by providing a harmonized API platform that translates raw sensor data into clinically relevant, longitudinal signals. Our technology powers prevention-first architectures for payers, insurers, and digital health providers—allowing them to shift from fragmented engagement to connected care ecosystems.

How Thryve Supports The Healthcare Shift

At Thryve, we provide the foundational infrastructure for this new era of prevention. Our infrastructure enables payors to move from fragmented engagement to scalable, connected care and to become architects of a healthier future. We support health insurers, payers, and digital health innovators by:

• Seamless Device Integration: Easily connect Oura Ring and over 500 other health monitoring devices to your platform via a single API, eliminating the need for multiple integrations.
• Standardized Biometric Models: Automatically harmonize biometric data streams, including heart rate, sleep metrics, skin temperature, activity levels, and HRV, making the data actionable and consistent across devices.
• GDPR-Compliant Infrastructure: Ensure full compliance with international privacy and security standards, including GDPR and HIPAA. All data is securely encrypted and managed according to the highest privacy requirements. Check our blog post about data privacy and security here!
• Customizable Dashboards and Alerts: Create tailored dashboards for healthcare providers and patients to visualize pregnancy-related trends, receive real-time alerts for abnormal patterns, and track recovery and readiness metrics post-delivery.

By investing in digital infrastructure today, insurers position themselves to shape the next decade of healthcare, not as passive payers, but as active enablers of healthier, more resilient populations. It is important to take action now. A great start would be to get more informed about the healthcare crisis and ways of overcoming it.

‍Download our playbook and get proactive already today.

Book a demo with Thryve and see how data can power your prevention strategy.