Monitoring your health and the cost of medical insurance

Aetna, one of the biggest health insurers in the United States, is the first in its sector to announce it will subsidize the cost of wearables and other devices to its customers to help them monitor their health and receive better services.

The insurer will launch a program that only includes Apple devices and will be extended to its more than fifty thousand employees starting in January 2017 and then gradually to both individual and corporate clients. The company has more than twenty-three million customers in the United States, a potential bonanza for Apple.

Aetna recently announced it was curtailing its participation participation in public insurance marketplaces set up by the Affordable Care Act — commonly known as Obamacare — claiming it would lose money. Its latest move could indicate a repositioning of the company to try to focus on customers with higher purchasing power who are prepared to pay a premium for proactive management of their health.

The program will cover a significant portion of the cost of the devices, starting with the Apple Watch, and will finance the rest of the cost by including it in customers’ monthly bills. It will also include specific apps designed by the company for the devices. The scheme will initially be offered to some corporate and individual clients, and gradually rolled out to the rest of its customer base.

The idea is to help its customers manage their health and wellness through information provided by the devices, improve diagnosis and prescription medications, try to increase adherence to treatment through reminders, make available applications to interact more easily with the company and to request, for example, prescriptions, treatments or to consult or request information about bills, as well as develop personalized and supervised health plans.

Last July, Fitbit announced Fitbit Group Health, which aims to offer the same type of services to communities and companies, insurance companies, weight control programs and clinical research. However, Aetna is the first health insurer to announce anything on this scale and include it as part of their policies.

This represents a big change in health management based on a proactive rather than reactive approach: given the current state of technology, access to regular readings of quantitative data such as physical activity, heart rate, estimated level of stress or other metrics that can be obtained by corresponding apps and using sensor devices will undoubtedly have a big effect on health monitoring, and doesn’t make much sense to wait for a problem to arise before trying to manage it, if through appropriate monitoring, it can be successfully prevented.

What’s new about this in reality, is not the monitoring itself, but that an insurance company considers this appraoch sufficiently interesting to become a key player in popularizing such devices, covering part of the cost in the belief that there is money to be made. Standardizing readings by only using the devices produced by a particular brand makes sense by reducing complexity and maximizing the development and efficiency of derivative algorithms. It makes sense that Apple, creator of programs like ResearchKit, be that company.

I’m sure a lot of companies in the industry will be paying attention to the results of this program. Those of us who have been using such devices to monitor our health for some time now, understand the potential. More professional management of such data and additional information will be a turning point in the way that many people manage their health.

(En español, aquí)