Hitachi Ltd. has agreed with Bao Viet Insurance of Vietnam to collaborate to drive innovation in the insurance business using artificial intelligence and medical big data.

The Japanese conglomerate said it started supplying Friday big data-analyzing technologies for an app provided by the state-run nonlife insurer as the first step of the partnership deal signed through local subsidiary Hitachi Asia (Vietnam) Co.

The new service via the Bao Viet Direct app is aimed at helping policyholders to measure the risk of developing diabetes and other lifestyle-related diseases and receive health guidance in a country that needs to raise awareness of these diseases.

In Vietnam, the rapid economic growth and expanded middle-income group have led to changes in people's lifestyles, with lifestyle diseases having increasingly become a problem in recent years.

Yet the ideas of prevention and early treatment are not instilled in most Vietnamese, and it is estimated that only around 30 percent of the more than 3.5 million diabetes patients in the country are receiving treatment, according to a press release issued jointly by the Hitachi companies and Bao Viet.

The latest tie-up will ensure talks on creating new health promotion services with possible links between the risk prediction service and the insurer's remote medical care services as well as the Bao Viet Direct app's health data management functions, they said.

Bao Viet is wholly owned by Bao Viet Holdings, Vietnam's leading insurance company, in which Japan's Sumitomo Life Insurance Co. has a 22.09 percent stake. (NNA/Kyodo)

==Kyodo

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