Is Life Insurance Ready for Predictive Health?

For decades, life insurance underwriting has largely relied on information such as age, medical history, family history, occupation, lifestyle and medical assessments to determine an individual’s risk.

But what happens when consumers can access significantly more information about their own health, sometimes years before a traditional diagnosis?

The rapid growth of preventative health testing, genetic screening, wearable technology and personalised health platforms such as Everlab raises an interesting question for the Australian retail life insurance industry:

What happens when consumers know more about their future health risks than their insurer does?

This is not simply a question about technology. It potentially goes to the heart of underwriting, consumer behaviour, privacy, adverse selection and the future role of the financial adviser.

The rise of preventative health testing

The traditional healthcare model has generally been reactive: a person develops symptoms, visits a doctor, undergoes testing and receives a diagnosis or treatment. The emerging preventative-health model is different. Consumers are increasingly seeking information about their health before they become unwell. One example is Everlab, an Australian preventative-health provider that says it combines medical history, advanced blood biomarkers, genetics, imaging, fitness assessments and other diagnostics into a consolidated health profile.

Its testing offering includes extensive blood testing, continuous glucose monitoring, CT coronary angiograms, whole body MRI’s, DEXA scans, isometric strength, genetic and DNA testing, among other assessments. The broader trend is that consumers are gaining access to increasingly detailed information about their own health and potential future risks. Everlab claims that 25% of their members have had findings flagged that have not been identified through the existing healthcare system.

From diagnosis to prediction

This creates a fundamental difference between traditional medical information and predictive health information.

Consider two hypothetical clients:

Client A: They have routine GP check-ups and otherwise have a fair idea about their health.

Client B: They have undergone extensive preventative testing and know their:

– cardiovascular biomarkers
– cholesterol levels
– metabolic markers
– biological-age measures
– genetic predispositions
– imaging results
– family-history risk

Neither person may have a diagnosed illness. However, client B may have substantially more information about their own underlying risk.

This creates an interesting issue for life insurance. The traditional underwriting model relies on the insurer gathering information about the applicant and assessing that information to determine risk. But if consumers increasingly have access to sophisticated testing themselves, the information gap between the consumer and insurer could change.

Therefore, if an individual discovers something about their future health risk that an insurer cannot consider, that individual may possess information that could influence their decision about how much insurance to purchase.

This is one of the fundamental challenges that life insurers and insurer’s will need to consider as predictive health information becomes more accessible.

Australia is already changing the rules around genetic information

In April 2026, legislation was passed banning life insurers from using adverse genetic testing results in life insurance underwriting. The legislation is scheduled to apply to life insurance contract decisions made from 8 October 2026, (Treasury Ministers).

What about non-genetic testing that preventative-health platforms can provide:

Such as:

– blood biomarkers
– cholesterol
– glucose
– blood pressure
– liver and kidney markers

Everlab describes its platform as allowing members to track biomarkers and health trends over time and retest to monitor changes. Imagine someone discovers an elevated cardiovascular risk profile. They then change their diet, exercise more, lose weight and receive medical treatment. Their biomarkers then improve significantly. Five years later, they apply for life insurance.

The question then becomes, which information matters?

The original abnormal results? Or their current results?

The treatment they received, their medical history, or the improvement over time?

And how should an insurer assess a risk that has changed because the consumer took proactive steps to improve their health?

Preventative testing is not necessarily bad news for insurers. In fact, it could potentially produce significant long-term benefits. These testing could lead to earlier disease detection, prevention, more effective treatment and improved population health, with the potential to reduce health and life insurance costs over the longer term.

The concept is relatively straightforward:

Early detection → earlier intervention → improved health → potentially lower future mortality or morbidity risk. If consumers identify a health risk early and successfully manage it, their actual future risk may be different from what it would have been without intervention.

This raises another interesting question:

Could life insurance eventually become more focused on the trajectory of a person’s health rather than simply their health at one point in time?

What happens to life insurance when consumers can predict and manage their own health risks much earlier?

The industry has historically operated around information pooling. Insurers collect information, assess risk and price policies based on the information available to them. But technology is increasingly putting sophisticated health information into the hands of individuals themselves.

If consumers can identify, monitor and improve their health risks before it can evolved into a medical condition, should life insurance underwriting continue to be based primarily on a snapshot of health  or will the industry eventually need to understand the health journey?

For us as advisers, we are watching this space very closely. Because the future of life insurance may not simply be about insuring against risk. It may increasingly be about understanding how that risk is identified, managed and changed over a person’s lifetime.

Sources

Everlab — Preventative health and diagnostics platform
Australian Treasury — Legislation passed to ban the use of adverse genetic testing results in life insurance (1 April 2026)