Swiss Re joins global health coalition, opens up data & analytics platform

Global reinsurer Swiss Re has joined a global coalition that aims to better predict and prevent outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics by leveraging data and analytics.

The Trinity Challenge members include the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook, GlaxoSmithKline, McKinsey & Company, the Gates Foundation, the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London.

The coalition was established to help develop ideas and tools that can be harnessed to help tackle the three stages of infectious disease emergencies: identification, response and recovery. Parallel to its participation in The Trinity Challenge, Swiss Re has integrated COVID-19 related health, economic and social data into a single platform called the Risk Resilience Center.

The platform has been designed to provide access to rich data on COVID-19 by integrating global data from over 100 sources. Swiss Re says the Risk Resilience Center is global in coverage, granular in depth, and continuously enriched. The platform lets The Trinity Challenge participants evaluate how stressed a country’s medical system is at a given point in time and enables predictions by combining real-time hospital and ICU bed occupancy rates with model projections.

The reinsurer will make the data assets and analytics tools available to The Trinity Challenge participants based on their specific research topics. The company is also reaching out to governments and multilateral development banks with the aim of providing them with access to the platform pro bono. “As one of the world’s leading tech- and data-enabled reinsurers we have been using data to make the world more resilient for more than 150 years,” said Ian Haycock, Chief Data Officer at Swiss Re.

“We are proud to build on this legacy by opening our pioneering Risk Resilience Center for the benefit of global health. “It typically takes weeks to have data integrated and curated – our platform updates, checks and transforms datasets automatically and multiple times per hour, with a continuous flow of incoming data, allowing for cross-country comparisons and drilldowns on states and regions.

“Equipped with these cutting-edge capabilities, The Trinity Challenge participants can analyse the spread of a pandemic, the economic impact of lockdowns or the success of behavioural changes like wearing a mask in limiting further infection.”

Source: Reinsurance News