The healthcare landscape is swarming with innovative mHealth apps and platforms, so much so that it might be difficult for some of the more successful solutions to get noticed. Two such companies who have established a good foundation are now looking to take that next step – working with providers.
That could ultimately make the difference between a fad and a lasting business.
In the consumer-facing market, there's Nudge, a Tennessee-based developer of a health and wellness app that has now unveiled Nudge Coach, targeted at health professionals who want to see snapshots of their patients' lifestyle choices. Nudge built its business plan on an app that allows users to track "the four pillars of lifestyle health" – fitness, exercise, sleep and nutrition.
Company founders Mac Gambill and Phil Beene said all the data in the world isn't going to mean anything unless it can be analyzed to produce meaningful advice. And that should be provided by clinicians.
"It's a major problem in the market," said Beene. "More and more people are trying to figure out how you can get all that data into a care model that will empower health professionals."
But will doctors want to know how healthy their patients are? Beene and Gambill think so. Giving them an easy snapshot (the data is organized into a single score, which can be broken down into more specific data points) of their patients' lifestyles enables them to improve patient engagement, identify trends and suggest care management tips that matter to the patient.
"It really doesn't take a lot of convincing. Most of their patients are already (using health and fitness tracking devices). In many cases just having that data is important," Gambill said, because it gives them a means of communication with their patients, an entry point into a better conversation about their health.
San Francisco-based HealthCrowd, meanwhile, works almost exclusively with the payer market, developing mobile messaging platforms that compel members to adopt more healthy lifestyles. Company founder and CEO Neng "Bing" Doh says health plans and insurers have a vested interest in making sure their members are healthy, so they're very interested in mHealth solutions that can provide targeted messaging.
Now Doh is looking at the provider market.
"It's going to take a while," she predicted. "There's still inertia on the provider front, but they have to be brought into the conversation."
Doh said she actually started with a provider-facing solution several years ago, "but it was too early – there was not a big crowd for health and wellness back then. So we moved to payers, who are (incentivized) to keep their members healthy."
That wasn't easy, either. While payers are motivated, "most of them have no idea" how to use mHealth tools and platforms, Doh said. As evidence, she pointed to the demise of Aetna's CarePass platform, which "made assumptions about how people want to engage … and just didn't pan out."
Doh said the healthcare landscape is shifting rapidly now, and providers need to be brought into that mix. She anticipates creating a HealthCrowd platform as a pay-as-you-go service for small providers, offering such tools as pre-natal and post-partum support, services for children and adolescents and chronic condition care management plans.
Doh said providers need to connect with their patient communities through mHealth not only because the consumer demands it, but because the Affordable Care Act is placing a premium on it.
"The times are a-changing," she said. "We woke up in 2014 and suddenly everybody was interested in patient engagement."
