Canadian businesses are quietly bleeding billions, and it’s because their employees aren’t well.
Poor mental health costs Canada’s economy about $51 billion a year in healthcare expenses and lost productivity. Businesses alone lose $6 billion annually due to absenteeism, presenteeism and high turnover.
“It’s about making health something that you enjoy doing and not like the chore you have to do.”
Antoine Moulet, Alan
Businesses that invest in mental health support and physical activity, on the other hand, see real returns through healthier, more engaged teams.
The payoff shows up in higher output, better profits, and an improved quality of life all around.
Physically active employees lose 10 fewer work days per year than their sedentary colleagues.
After growing to 700,000 members across Europe, Alan recently brought its virtual-first health platform to Canada to challenge what it sees as a prehistoric approach to insurance.
The company lets employers buy group health insurance entirely online in a few minutes, at fees that are half the cost of average incumbent insurers.
Alan’s larger goal is to reposition employee wellbeing as an investment in productivity and public health, not just a cost centre.
Its secret weapon is Alan Play, a preventive health platform that rewards users for healthy choices like breathwork, walking more, and practicing stress management. It works by tapping into the dopamine-driven survival instincts that kept our ancestors alive.
That immediate reward is why it works.
“Our brains are still like caveman brains—it’s just the way we are programmed,” said Antoine Moulet, a quantum physicist-turned-senior product manager who leads Alan’s gamification team.
Alan Play flips the script. Rather than fight our programming, it delivers small, instant rewards, like digital badges, step challenges, and AI-assisted journaling, that encourage modern wellness goals.
From prototype to phenomenon
Alan Play began in 2024, after Moulet’s team realized that personalized health advice wasn’t enough to change behaviour.
“It was just another thing telling you what’s good for you, maybe in a better, digital way, like a better governmental prevention ad,” Moulet recalls. “People might read it and think ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ and then forget about it.”
So the company asked itself a different question: Why do some digital experiences feel like a chore while others are addictive?
In response, the team tested a step-counting prototype on 20 employees. It linked to users’ phones, rewarded movement with points they could donate to charity, and showed weekly leaderboards. It spread quickly.
“The next day, there were 100 Alaners on the leaderboard,” Moulet said. “It wasn’t even open in their app. They had to scan a QR code to access it. Suddenly, people wanted to come in and do something for themselves.”
Today, the feature is fully integrated into the Alan app. Users earn “berries” for completing health challenges and can donate them to monthly charity initiatives like vaccinating children in India or supporting Doctors Without Borders. The platform also includes team competitions, personal avatars, achievement badges and social leaderboards that create what Moulet calls “conversations at the coffee machine.”
“It’s about making health something that you enjoy doing and not like the chore you have to do because you’ve been told 10,000 times you need to do 10,000 steps,” Moulet added.
The business case for better health
Early results from Alan’s European operations suggest it may be onto something: engaged Alan Play users walk 20,000 more steps per month, while 80 percent of HR departments report better team comradery. The platform achieves 40 percent employee adoption rates at launch, jumping to 70 to 80 percent when HR teams actively promote the program.
Up to a third of users return to the platform weekly, according to Moulet. “This has become part of their health routine. They use it to check their step numbers, do a health challenge, meditation, breathing, and journaling.”
The connection between employee health and business performance isn’t just theoretical.
That’s exactly the thinking behind Alan Play.
“We can prove that you’re 50 percent more likely to engage in another preventative health action once you start engaging with your health through a small health behaviour, like walking and meditation or breath work,” said Mark Goad, general manager of Alan Canada. This cascading effect means companies see returns beyond just reduced insurance claims.
Addressing Canada’s healthcare crisis
For Data Loft CEO Jansen Sullivan, Alan’s system is doing what old-school benefits never could.
Data Loft builds dashboards that turn messy data into actionable insight. But when it came to benefits, Sullivan found himself frustrated with his previous provider. It took ten minutes to log in, there was no clear reporting, and he dealt with a steady stream of employee questions about how to file claims. “The reporting maze was the final straw,” Sullivan said.
That changed in December 2024, when he was introduced to Alan. The biggest difference, according to Sullivan, was silence. “The app is clear, so no one needs me to walk them through it,” he said. “Claims go in, money comes back, and we don’t think about it. I get that time back, and the team stays focused.”
Alan, which has also begun working with Canadian companies like Upside Robotics and Vantage Developments, has a broader goal in the long term: to help Canada move away from reactive care.
“We spend about $372 billion a year on healthcare, but only a fraction of that is on preventative initiatives,” said Goad. “We are just continuing to dig and dig and dig this hole entirely around a reactive care system.”
Alan’s answer is to encourage healthier behaviours so people don’t get so sick in the first place.
“We’re convinced that the next frontier in health is around prevention,” said Moulet. “Chronic diseases are treated with meds, but ultimately they’re a fix for bad lifestyles. We should be fostering better preventive behaviours.”
That’s a big shift from traditional insurance, which only reacts to illness after the fact.
“A private insurer only knows you are sick when you’ve submitted that bill for a prescription drug – after you got sick, then you went to the doctor, then you got a diagnosis, then you got a prescription,” Goad said. “That’s the only point in which they know what’s happening in your life.”
In a country where 6.5 million people don’t have a family doctor and wait times for care can stretch for weeks, Alan’s gamified approach to prevention might just be the evolutionary leap the country has been waiting for.
“I think that’s what Canadians deserve,” Goad said, calling the current state of healthcare “maybe the least automated, least technologically inclined industry that we interact with.”
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Alan enables our 700,000 members to take action for their physical and mental health by combining the best of prevention and insurance. Learn more.
All photos provided by Alan.