Moves are afoot in the US to confirm the legal status of wellness programmes that ask employees to disclose medical information as voluntary. That means employers are entitled to ask employees that refuse to participate in programmes, which can involve disclosing disabilities, family medical history and perhaps even genetic information, to contribute up to 30% more than their discounted colleagues, towards their insurance cover.

American law professor and blogger, Nicholas Bagley, has explained how that will force employees to give over sensitive information to their employers – opening them up to discrimination. Data would be given over in an anonymised form, however, as we heard from the health tech expert Dr Indu Subaiya last year, this is no protection for those that work in small or mid-sized businesses.

And as we also wrote in the piece, the notion that wellness programmes cut insurance premiums for some without any impact to the premiums of everyone else is dubious at best. That’s true even if you accept they work, which many people don’t.

But Bagley misses the true importance of the collection of data. Wellness programmes, which increasingly involve apps, wearables and other digital health tools, are engines for data and this eventually makes its way to insurers via aggregators and other means. Allowing them to more accurately assess risk.

The point is with limited potential for America’s insurers to grow in the US now that the ACA is under threat and the courts are blocking further mergers, they will be looking abroad. And when they do they are also likely to bring these lessons with them fuelling growth in markets for patient platforms, wellness programmes and all things digital.