Two US researchers recently sparked controversy with their work on the role of “luck” in cancer. Their latest article was published in the March issue of the prestigious journal Science. The researchers, Christian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, showed that the disease is less dependent on hereditary (a genetic predisposition) and environmental risks (such as smoking, or asbestos exposure) than on random mutations (such as DNA replication errors) arising spontaneously in cells as they divide and reproduce over the course of our lifetimes.

Health coaching is one of the most powerful ways of changing people’s mindsets for the long term. Practitioners are rapidly taking their place alongside executive coaches, life coaches and personal trainers as another means of making us better people through one-to-one improvement sessions.

We live in a digitized era. Our professional and personal lives go by the dictum that data should drive our actions and reactions. In the course of doing business, companies receive and handle a significant volume of data, and in many instances, this data will include critical—and sensitive—personal data about individuals, be they customers or even employees. Data is increasingly seen as essential to be competitive and is, in its own way, a currency. However, being a data handler also comes with responsibilities and significant risk. In the Philippines, an archipelago composed of 7,107 islands and a population of over 100 million, legislators realized that legislation needed to catch up with this new digital reality.

The UK Group Risk market – even more employees and premiums but, continuing a theme, still too few employer customers purchasing group risk benefits

In today’s landscape, employee benefits need to become the hot topic of conversation. There are many factors driving this since the demographics surrounding today’s workforce are constantly changing. With evolving employee demands and expectations, and new ways of working (think gig economy), employers need to play the employee benefits card to entice potential and current talent to stay put.

Global Benefits Vision: Reto, thank you for agreeing to this interview. Has elipsLife adopted InsurTech? What is your strategy going forward and what are your achievements regarding InsurTech? Reto Toscan: InsurTech is a hot buzzword that gets thrown around a lot, but at elipsLife we’ve embraced it by building one of the most digital and integrated platforms in the business.

Global Benefits Vision: Hello Enrique. Tell us about the highlights of your career, but first, how did you come to enter the insurance field? Enrique Avecedo: Right after I graduated from university with my business degree, I started working in administration at my father’s insurance brokerage firm. I learned operations in a hands-on manner: record-keeping, taking policies to clients, collecting premiums—I’ve done everything.

The current epidemic in the US is thought to have begun with the over-prescription of opioids for pain relief: in 1991, 76m opioid prescriptions were dispensed by US retail pharmacies. By 2011, this figure was 219m. The overall rate of death from drug overdose more than trebled in the US between 1999 and 2016.

Updated blood pressure guidelines from the American Heart Association mean that many more Americans, notably older people, are now diagnosed with high blood pressure, or hypertension. This may sound like bad news, but the new guidelines highlight some important lessons we cardiologists and heart health researchers have learned from the latest blood pressure studies. Specifically, we have learned that damage from high blood pressure starts at much lower blood pressures than previously thought and that it is more important than ever to start paying attention to your blood pressure before it starts causing problems.

Global Benefits Vision is celebrating its third year of publication, an auspicious milestone for a magazine that appeals to such a specialised audience. Owned and operated by global employee benefits industry executives, Global Benefits Vision’s mission is to contribute to the development of the market and to the development of global employee benefits and global mobility professionals, whilst keeping a neutral position among providers.