Dive Brief:
- In an effort to help consumers manage their own health, Aetna has created a new hub offering access to health and wellness apps from a single centralized source.
- The hub, which it calls CarePass, offers a wide range of tools, including apps that track medication adherence, stress and chronic conditions.
- Aetna officials say they believe that more use of such tools could save the health system a great deal of money; for example, half of all people were medications for chronic conditions stop taking that drug within a year, a problem which costs the health system an estimated $290 billion each year.
Dive Insight:
I believe this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to seeing large healthcare organizations rollout mobile-based approaches to health management. Soon, not only payers will have apps that they make available chair and encourage the use of, healthcare providers will soon do the same, as everyone involved will need to squeeze every victory they can out of new technology to meet ACO-style demands for quality and strong overall population health. Aetna, given its size, will be able to help the healthcare industry as a whole by sharing news of its experiences (and its metrics for measuring success) with CarePass. I'm eager to see how this turns out.