In February when Humana announced its partial acquisition of South Africa-based Discovery Holdings to take the company's Vitality wellness platform to the US, it was no surprise that the health plan was making moves to up engagement with its members and move toward wellness services. The surprise was that Humana decided to bring a new platform to the US rather than work with one of the many existing ones already in the market.
Humana's CSO Paul Kusserow told MobiHealthNews in February that HumanaVitality would include a strong mobile component since that was a key way to drive engagement with consumers, he said. A number of other wellness platforms already feature mobile apps and connected health and fitness devices as core to their offerings -- Partners HealthCare spinout Healthrageous may be the most mobilized of the group.
While there are certainly others, we collected a handful of wellness platforms that look to be the incumbents of the market HumanaVitality just entered. Also included is another newcomer: Cerner, which just announced its intent to fill the void created by Google Health's passing by offering up an employer-focused wellness platform called Cerner Health.
Check out our list of five (UPDATE: now 11) HumanaVitality competitors below and let us know who we missed in the comments section.
Keas
Keas was launched in 2009 by former Google Health head Adam Bosworth. Originally, the idea was similar to the distribution model of Apple’s AppStore — medical experts could create their own health plans to the Keas platform and encourage patients to subscribe to them. If users purchased one of these care plans, Keas would take a cut of the revenue and pass the rest onto the plan’s designers.
Initial launch partners included Healthwise, Google Health, Microsoft HealthVault, Quest Diagnostics and Dr. Alan Greene.
Two years later, that business model has been thrown to the curb. Now, Keas is focused on the workplace, offering "play" focused healthcare programs that reward working out and other healty activities and are collected via a social network interface. The design borrows from Apple, Facebook, and Twitter, including 'Like' buttons, a News Feed, social games, and a team aspect that encourages positive peer pressure for staying fit.
Healthrageous
Originally started as a spinout of Partners HealthCare’s Center for Connected Health, Healthrageous creates apps for weight loss, diabetes, hypertension and other conditions using data collected from biometric sensors. As of this past spring more than 1,000 users are currently using their offerings.
Their mobile app on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry, h!GO, "aims to help users shed unhealthy habits and embrace healthy lifestyles." The app tracks blood pressure and blood sugar level as well as fitness activity.
Companies can use Healthrageous to improve condition-specific health issues, resulting in lower costs of employee health care, and offer benefits for healthy behavior.
Team Wellness Challenge
Team Wellness Challenge is a free online points-based wellness program designed for government employees and wellness coordinators. Employees track exercise, walking, and nutrition data, and compete individually or in teams of up to four people to win monthly points and walking challenges. Government agency wellness coordinators can track the data on the wellness challenge website and create individualized agency contests and inducements to encourage employees to participate and enjoy the benefits of a healthier lifestyle.
Participants can track their exercises through a Pedometer Diary, Walking and Running Diaries, Exercise Diary, and other health-related categories by logging into the website, either from work or at home.
Earndit
Earndit is another company offering incentivized points-based fitness tracking, though there focus is on the consumer side of rewards-based health. In fact, Earndit criticizes employer wellness programs on their blog, saying that "we are building a company that will remove employers from the equation and allow anyone and everyone to receive benefits for leading a more active life."
Earndit works in tandem with services like RunKeeper, FitBit, and Nike+, using those companies' wearable sensor devices to set goals for fitness. Successful completion of goals rewards users with points that can be spent on things like online gift cards and consultations with dietitians.
Virgin HealthMiles
One of the old timers in this group: Virgin HealthMiles is another employee health program that rewards people for getting active. Their Pay-for-Prevention system is offered by employers, government entities, insurers and other network partners like health clubs. An online portal LifeZone tracks all the data collected from wearable sensors as well a HealthZone station, which collects blood pressure, body fat percentage and heart rate information.
HealthMiles, according to Virgin, improves on the "unquantifiable results based on the self-reported data of limited participants," with clearly measurable efficacy metrics. Multiple case studies are available on their site that showcase the program's effectiveness.
Cerner
EHR company Cerner's Cerner Health branch, which was used to to promote health & wellness among the company's employees, was such a success that it's being expanded to Cerner’s home town of Kansas City (employers, providers, etc.) soon, according to a recent Chillmark Research report. Cerner Health will be the first employer market the company has attempted to infiltrate, and will target a number of health & wellness areas using incentive programs. Cerner Health will include “Health Graphs,” a conceptual analytics framework which combines multiple data streams to provide an accurate view of population health at the community level.
MeYouHealth
With a multitude of mobile, desktop and web-based apps, MeYouHealth has an aggressive consumer wellness offering. MeYouHealth's apps focus on fun ways to exercise, eat healthy foods and share results with strong social media integration. One feature challenges users to do a specific healthy action a day. It's called The Daily Challenge, and by meeting it users can earn points and share the results with friends via Facebook. Munch-5-a-Day is a rudimentary tracker of daily fruit and vegetable consumption. EveryDRINK is a desktop widget that encourages water consumption throughout the day. Finally, the Twitter Well-Being Tracker has users answering questions about their mental and physical health and tweeting the results.
Limeade
According to their website, Limeade's wellness program answers the question, "Can we build an evidence-based way to measure and improve everything that creates human well-being?" They do so through offering employer services including well-being assessments, goal setting and tracking, and incentive-based rewards with a strong focus on positive attitudes and reinforcement. Limeade users can track all this via a mobile-compatible user interface.
ShapeUp
ShapeUp was founded in 2006 by two medical students at Brown University. They noticed that patients who were most successful at achieving lasting healthy behavior used their social networks to hold them accountable for meeting their goals. To that end, ShapeUp creates a custom (HIPAA compliant) private social network for each company, where employees participate in year-round healthy challenges that focus on nutrition, exercise, weight management, and stress reduction.
RedBrick Health
RedBrickHealth aims to "reinvent" employee wellness programs and "combines deep personalization, powerful social tools and a unique approach to rewarding healthy behaviors" to do so. Their "Intelligent Engagement Engine" combines data from multiple sources, including health assessments and biometric readings, to create personalized Health Maps for each user. Users are reminded of personal health goals, encouraged to use social media tools to interact with others, and are financially rewarded for positive growth.
Fitocracy
Fitocracy is a consumer-facing web application that aims to "make fitness a more fun, more addictive experience" similar to competitive videogame playing. Users can sign into the site using their Facebook or Twitter account to extensively log workouts, from the amount of weight bench-pressed to miles run on a treadmill, as well as to do challenges and "quests" that earn them points. There are "leaderboard" rankings of most active users that resemble videogame rankings. User profiles can also be tagged to display certain fitness interests, in order to find others with similar tastes.
HealthMonth
HealthMonth is an online game that allows users to compete against each other in achieving fitness goals via monthly competitions. Users can earn "life points" which raise their user ranking and create personal rewards for completing goals like "eating greens five times a week." "Rules" for healthy living can be created by the user. They can be categorized as "Do's," "Don'ts, "Extreme Rules," "Moderate Rules," and more. If users fail a challenge, they can lose points, but in-game items can help them restore them.
