Along with a few hundred other advisers, I attended the Intercontinental hotel on Park Lane yesterday to hear PruHealth announce some enhancements to its ‘Vitality’ concept. In brief, Vitality is a wellness engagement programme that offers rewards to the member while improving the insurer’s claims experience. That’s the theory, anyway.

PruHealth appeared to pull back from the Vitality concept when it withdrew its free gym offer in early 2010, but this refresh once again makes it central to the insurer’s proposition. So much so that CEO Neville Koopowitz made clear at the launch that PruHealth no longer sees itself simply as a private medical insurer, but also as a wellness company.

Whatever advisers think of PruHealth, the insurer cannot be ignored. Even when it had relatively little market share (before the acquisition of Standard Life Healthcare), it set the pace, innovating in a fairly staid market. With the number of PMI subscribers in decline, PruHealth wants to broaden the appeal of the product and provide its members with more than just an insurance policy.

From next year, PruHealth policyholders will have access to a huge number of benefits that include special mobile phone tariffs, discounted holidays and tailored health plans. However, Neville Koopowitz, speaking to Health Insurance Magazine, said, ‘if people just see it as some discounts added to PMI then, quite frankly, they just don’t get it’.

Whether Mr Koopowitz is able to grow the market with this approach remains to be seen. I cannot help but admire PruHealth for its spirit of innovation, but it must be an insurer first and foremost and consumers expect insurers to pay claims before sending them on cheap holidays. As an adviser, the suitability and robustness of the insurance product will always be my primary focus.