Health Programs: Our Vision for Software and Data at Care/of
In the inaugural post of our tech blog, we lay out our vision for the digital tools that will become an important part of the Care/of customer experience
Care/of and technology
Our co-founders, Craig Elbert and Akash Shah, created Care/of as an e-commerce company with great ambitions for technology. Our core product is our monthly box of vitamins and supplements, customized for your health goals. Whether you are concerned about long-term goals like bone health, or you know a specific nutritional deficiency that you are trying to improve, we’ve been delighted to hear about all the ways your personalized packs have contributed to your health and wellness regimens.
When Craig and Akash were initially exploring the vitamins and supplements market, they identified three frustrations:
- It is overwhelming and confusing.
- Trust is difficult due to a lack of transparency.
- There is no feedback loop.
With our first digital product, the personalization quiz, we’ve been working to demystify the space so that it is navigable, even for users exploring supplements for the first time. Our interactive questionnaire guides you to an informed decision about which supplements could be a useful part of your personal plan.
To address consumer trust, we knew we needed to be transparent about our ingredients and supply chain. (Click into our different product pages to see how we present each supplement.) But just as software was our solution to the first problem, it will also be integral to how we approach increasing transparency and creating a feedback loop. Closing the feedback loop is by far the largest challenge and one that we don’t expect to tackle overnight—but we want to dream big. In the long run, we view engineering and data science as the means to help us do just that.
In this post, we’d like to share our motivation for exploring health technology, our special challenges in combining e-commerce and health tech, and our vision for how the bundling of the two will help our users reach their wellness goals. We’ll also detail what you can do with the first set of features in our Apple HealthKit integration, and what’s up next for health programs in the app. Finally, we’ll conclude with some brief thoughts on the future of data in healthcare.
Transparency and data: Measuring what you want to improve
From the start, we’ve always wanted to address the intimidating lack of consensus that smart consumers face when evaluating their options for vitamins and supplements. The vitamin aisles are overwhelming; the quality of one brand versus another is hard to determine, and scientific studies on the actual efficacy of various supplements have mixed results. The New York Times recently covered several of the complications: a vitamin is different on its own versus in whole foods, where chemicals have complex interactions; clinical trials could reverse conclusions on a given supplement after decades of research; and no matter how clean your experimental design is, it’s hard to untangle confounding factors such as education, wealth, and general health practices from any statistical attempt to parse out causal relationships.
On our product pages, we love calling out when supplements are supported by strong scientific agreement (vitamin D) and when they are part of traditional-use medicines with only emerging scientific attention (ashwagandha). Like any consumer business, we want to make sure our customers are getting everything they can out of our products. And an essential part of ensuring that outcome is to measure how our products are doing. If you take rhodiola and vitamin B12 to support stress management and energy, we want to measure those quantities rigorously. And if you take fish oil for a very long-term goal like heart health, we want to be a part of that journey you’re taking, with measurement and analysis over the long run.
These are extremely difficult relationships to study. But as a wellness-focused tech company, we have the special advantage of being able to collect a large amount of data digitally, across a diverse sample of users, via a mobile app and other technologies. It is our goal to objectively study the effects of dietary supplements on various health targets, usually in the framework of supervised learning. At the same time, we are subject to the same confounding factors that make any nutritional research very challenging.
Furthermore, because we are positioning ourselves at this intersection of e-commerce and health tech, we take on critical responsibilities
- to safeguard private health data, especially in an era when data breaches have had far-reaching consequences; and
- to be judicious about reporting the data science findings of a tech company as distinct from asserting health recommendations within the larger sphere of scientific research—both of which we plan to do.
The privacy and regulatory issues are sensitive areas that we will explore in depth in upcoming posts. Compliance with legal and regulatory requirements and the protection of personally identifiable information are of paramount importance to us.
The mobile app and HealthKit
Last November, we launched a mobile app with a daily reminder feature and a check-in system to earn promotional rewards. We created this app because our vision for what Care/of can do stretches beyond the box you receive every month. We want to pair our physical products with an enlightening digital experience that will be a key part of the service we provide in the years to come.
Reminders and check-ins were just the beginning. As of May, our mobile app now has integration with Apple’s HealthKit! You can download our latest release here to try it out.
We launched our integration with HealthKit (also known simply as Apple Health) with some basic syncing to get you started in the world of health tech. If you are new to it, HealthKit tracks a wide variety of metrics across subject areas like vital signs, activity, sleep, and reproductive health. A mobile app like ours can integrate with this functionality and be the instrument that tracks a selection of these metrics. As a whole, HealthKit then becomes a centralized hub for your personal health data, as measured by different hardware and software.
For example, if you own a wearable device, HealthKit can keep track of your step count and heart rate. For Care/of, the relevant quantities are vitamin and mineral intake: amounts of vitamin B12, vitamin D, magnesium, iron, and so on. We have mapped our own products to these quantities officially supported by HealthKit. Thus, when you do your normal daily check-in on our app, you now have the option to record what you’re taking in HealthKit.
Finally, HealthKit integration is just one aspect of our long-term plan to fully develop the Care/of app into a service with many digital health programs. This year we are piloting a program for stress, which will thoughtfully combine our physical products (ashwagandha, rhodiola, Quick Sticks) with digital tools. The app will offer customized plans for managing stress both from a holistic perspective and with targeted strategies. Much more to come here!
Healthcare driven by tech and data
Many of our customers have written to us about how they have our app open at the doctor’s office when they are reviewing their supplement regimen with their physician. We love this model and think it’s a great use case for how the Care/of app can aid and advance the dialogue about your health. Through your check-ins, you will have daily, detailed data about your supplement intake. And whether you need to add a new vitamin, scale back a dosage, get better at adhering to a routine, or work through a targeted stress program, accurate reporting is the first step toward a quantitative understanding of your health.
We are so excited to be pairing our subscription boxes with a digital experience. The rise of wearables and of health apps for things like meditation and sleep presages a new period when machine learning applications in healthcare can become mainstream. In the last few months alone, we have seen convolutional neural networks compete with radiologists in cancer detection, as well as retinal scans be surprisingly predictive of cardiac events. Care/of has the ambition to bring this kind of machine intelligence to wellness at an everyday level. With enough users and data over time, we can tackle difficult questions that sometimes may not have the funding for appropriate sample sizes in research studies.
Nutritional supplements are not a panacea; they need to be integrated with a holistic approach to self-care that also addresses diet, exercise, sleep, stress, and mental health. This is our long-term vision for what we are building at Care/of. We believe in digital tools, and our physical and digital products will work in tandem, helping you achieve your wellness goals with the high-quality supplements we’ve been making since launch—and with a data-driven, innovative approach to health technology.
Creators
Full-stack engineers: Ryan Bright and Laura Johannet (app); Eric Gross, Nic Hippenmeyer, Nizar Dhamani
Design: Derek Chan, Erin Keeffe
Product: Akash Shah, Monica Chin, Dennis Blanco
Data science: Tristan Eisenhart
Writers
Niels Joaquin, Craig Elbert
