Dive Brief:
- Despite obtaining some market traction, Aetna has decided to close down its CarePass mobile platform by the end of this year and has abandoned all future plans for the project.
- CarePass, which launched last year, allowed consumers to track certain health apps from a single online hub.
- Still despite attracting widespread support, including collaboration from mobile companies like Fitbit and 100 million downloads of the CarePass integrated apps, Aetna plans to fold the project completely and take lessons learned over to some of its other mobile projects, including its well-known iTriage app.
Dive Insight:
Here's a story which begs a lot of questions, most particularly why Aetna would abruptly drop the project when it seems to have attracted a great deal of support. The buzz around the decision was uniformly surprise and disappointment, at least in the Twitter #healthIT and #mHealth channels.
Since Aetna isn't telling, others are left to speculate as to why CarePass went under. One possible explanation comes from CTO blogger Jeff Brandt, who argues that the failure is no big surprise, in particular because while consumers downloaded a lot of apps, most were downloaded, used once or twice and then abandoned. In his view, the only way to get patients to really use apps is for doctors to prescribe them, then have a facility available to transmit patient-provided data to the provider's EMR.
Until payers work together on projects of this kind—as well as with the providers in their network—the data sharing that is really necessary won't happen, Brandt suggests. Since that's probably not going to happen in the near future, mHealth innovation likely will continue to come from the ground up, with smaller, more agile companies making things happen.
Want to read more? You might like this story about why Apple and Epic are unlikely to dominate mHealth anytime soon.