From mutual aid to integrated healthcare
In a rapidly aging country where pressure on the healthcare system is increasing, health is no longer an individual issue but an economic, social, and cultural one. Within this context lies the evolution of Reale Group, a key player in a process that is redefining the role of an insurance company: one that cannot limit itself to handling claims but must accompany people before they occur, helping them prevent risks and live better.
To understand this transformation, one must start from its origins. Reale Mutua was founded in Turin in 1828 and has spanned nearly two centuries of history while maintaining its mutualistic DNA intact: members to be protected, not shareholders to be rewarded. This fundamental difference shapes decisions oriented toward the long term and the creation of value for communities. From this foundation emerges an approach to health that integrates protection and service, placing accessibility and quality of experience at the center throughout the entire healthcare journey of each insured member.
The first concrete building block of this model is Blue Assistance, the company established in 1993 to develop the health insurance segment and build a dedicated platform. Its core is a network of more than 6,500 service points and over 9,000 affiliated healthcare facilities, with thousands of specialist doctors distributed across the country. This extensive network allows more than 3.5 million insured people to access high-quality services without upfront payment. Alongside this, there is an integrated management of the entire healthcare process: from opening cases via a dedicated call center to reimbursement handling, and customer care that supports clients even after the service has been delivered. In short, Reale Group’s company simplifies access to care, reduces waiting times, and delivers 360-degree excellence in service.
On top of this infrastructure, a broader system has been developed based on partnerships with specialized providers—from diagnostics to telemedicine and cutting-edge clinics—which has expanded response capacity beyond the purely insurance dimension. This has led to the creation of Blue Health Center, Reale Group’s first digital healthcare facility, offering 24/7 telemedicine services with general practitioner and specialist consultations, as well as the possibility of obtaining a digital health profile and a personalized prevention plan. Its integration within the Group, together with Blue Assistance, ensures that users benefit from a predominantly digital patient journey which, when necessary, is completed through in-person access within the Blue network.
This trajectory reaches a consolidation point with the recent acquisition of Lifenet Healthcare, one of the leading private healthcare groups in Italy. This represents an important step in Reale Group’s evolution in the healthcare sector, including services dedicated to long-term care, an area expected to grow significantly due to demographic trends. Projections indicate that the working-age population will progressively become smaller than the elderly population, with increasing longevity accompanied by new forms of vulnerability. Taking care of one’s health therefore directly impacts the sustainability of the national system. To address this challenge, the Group has developed a holistic approach to wellbeing that integrates physical and mental health and spans all stages of life. This is not an abstract principle but a set of concrete initiatives aimed primarily at its employees, whose wellbeing translates into greater operational continuity, higher quality relationships, and the ability to generate long-term value. This is demonstrated by internal health prevention programs, psychological support, sports activities, mindfulness initiatives, work-life balance tools, and nutritional education programs. In this way, an organizational ecosystem is created that becomes a model for customers and stakeholders alike.
For Reale Group, prevention therefore plays a central role and is structured on two complementary levels. Primary prevention aims to promote healthy lifestyles by addressing factors such as nutrition, physical activity, sleep quality, relationships, and environment. In this context, the collaboration with Slow Food also fits in, based on a shared vision of wellbeing as a balance between individual, territory, and community. Secondary prevention, on the other hand, focuses on monitoring tools and early diagnosis, including the Blue Health Center digital platform Qurakare, which enables users to build a personalized health profile and receive guidance on recommended medical check-ups. More recently, new applications dedicated to gender medicine have also been introduced, an increasingly important field for better understanding differences in how diseases manifest.
The decisive shift, however, is cultural, as the goal is not only to provide services but to generate awareness. As the Group’s experience shows, it is often everyday behaviors—diet, physical activity, stress management—that determine long-term outcomes. Acting on this dimension means addressing risk at its source. Since 2022, with its status as a Benefit Corporation, Reale Group has formalized this commitment by integrating economic objectives with measurable social impact. In a context where the National Health Service is required to do more with limited resources and families bear an increasing share of healthcare spending, supplementary healthcare is becoming increasingly structural. It is here that the Group’s strategy finds its synthesis: prevention, protection, and care—three guiding principles that describe a way of supporting people over time, contributing to the construction of a more sustainable and conscious model of health.