Ready to get to know another member of the MAXIS team? This month, we sat down with Richard Reyf, our Director of Global Healthcare Data Analytics. He told us the biggest health and wellness trends, the challenges facing multinational employers and how health analytics have evolved at MAXIS. He also shares some of the key findings from our 2026 whitepaper, which focuses on how multinationals can create an effective and sustainable GLP-1 strategy for their people.
As Director of Global Healthcare Data Analytics, I turn health and claims data into meaningful insights. This helps our clients understand the health risks facing their workforce so they can take proactive steps to manage them. An important part of my role is condensing all the data from our network partners around the world and making it actionable by looking at the key trends and cost drivers that are impacting our clients and their workforces. Our team is focused on going beyond traditional reporting so that our clients can identify emerging risks earlier and make more informed, proactive decisions about their EB programmes.
Since I joined MAXIS in 2019, we’ve transformed how we analyse data and present insights to our clients. A key part of this has been the move from traditional Excel reports to our interactive Tableau dashboards, giving us the ability to explore health data in much greater depth and allowing our clients to interact with their results directly. We’ve also improved how we present data, moving away from sharing large volumes of claims towards more focused, insight-led storytelling. Without good data it’s impossible to know if you are investing in the correct areas and with the greatest impact. We don’t just look at what’s happening in the data, we delve deeper and question why certain things are happening, who they are affecting and what we – and our multinational clients – can do about them.
The major trends we’re seeing involve the growing burden of chronic disease and metabolic risk, cancer, musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions and mental health conditions. As the second-largest cost driver in our data, cancer remains a major area of concern. What’s even more concerning is that our data is showing rising chronic disease and cancer diagnoses among young people. This trend makes early detection, screening and prevention crucial for employers when it comes to both employee health outcomes and long-term cost management. Personally, I think the biggest challenge for multinational employers is that health is highly local. The risk profile of a workforce is shaped not only by where employees live, but by age, gender, ethnicity, occupation, culture, lifestyle and access to healthcare, to name a few factors. A global healthcare strategy needs to understand this challenge and be flexible enough to respond to these differing local health contexts and needs.
We launched our latest whitepaper in September, exploring how employers can build an effective GLP-1 strategy. There’s a huge interest in GLP-1s at the moment and it isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, but the debate is about more than just weight loss: our data shows that chronic conditions (such as obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease) are affecting employees earlier in life, which means they’ll spend a greater portion of their working lives managing and claiming for them. This has huge implications for multinational employers looking to manage their medical claims costs. And while GLP-1s present a huge opportunity for employee health outcomes, there’s so much for multinationals to consider when it comes to building an effective strategy that’s sustainable over the long term. Our whitepaper looks at how employers can better understand their workforce, identify who could benefit from these treatments and create a strategy that supports their people with wraparound care rather than simply providing GLP-1 therapies and leaving them to it. I’d encourage anyone who is interested in this topic to read the whitepaper in more detail!
My biggest highlight from my time at MAXIS has been seeing our health analytics capabilities evolve and using our data to inform real client conversations. There’s something very rewarding about taking complex claims data and turning it into actionable insights that help our clients support and care for their people. That’s ultimately what analytics should do. It shouldn’t just be about creating another dashboard or report, it should be about identifying issues, presenting them in a way that’s clear and useful, and helping employers make decisions that improve health outcomes for their people.
Outside of work, my favourite way to switch off is by spending time with my family, particularly my daughter. I’m also very passionate about antiques, particularly European porcelain. I really enjoy the research side of collecting and identifying pieces, understanding their history and craftsmanship, and learning about the different makers and periods. It’s quite different from health analytics, although there is probably a common thread: I enjoy looking closely at something, finding details that others might miss and uncovering the story behind it.