Aetna's Apple Watch App Aims to Personalize & Incentivize Digital Health
- by Arnold Ball
- in Medicine
- — Jan 31, 2019
The app will be available to download in the spring of 2019.
"As we learn over time, the goal is to make more customized recommendations that will help members accomplish their goals and live healthier lives", Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer, said in a statement.
According to Aetna, the app was borne from a 2016 collaboration with Apple, where 90 percent of participants reported health benefits from using an Apple Watch.
For example, recommendations are based on clinical guidelines and may include notifications to get vaccinations or refill medications.
Once you install the Attain app on your Apple Watch or iPhone you'll start getting daily and activity goals based on your age, sex and weight. Through analytics and machine learning, the collaboration will lead to new features for Attain, offering more personalized recommendations created to give greater context and decrease barriers to health care. If you decide to leave the Attain program or fail to meet your goals, you may have to pay off the remaining cost of the Watch, though if you have an issue that precludes you from achieving goals, such as pregnancy or another medical condition, Aetna can take that into consideration.
Attain users will have the option to share their personal health data with Apple, the companies said.
This giveaway comes as part of the upcoming launch of Aetna's Attain wellness app. This isn't the first partnership between a health insurance company and a wearables maker-there are plenty of corporate wellness programs involving Fitbits, and past year UnitedHealthcare also offered "free" Apple Watches to its members who opted in to its "Motion" program. Through analytics and machine learning, the collaboration will lead to new features for Attain, offering more personalized recommendations created to give greater context and decrease barriers to health care, the insurer said. For customers that already own an Apple Watch, these credits can be used towards gift cards or donations to charity. At the time, Aetna agreed to partially or fully subsidize the cost of the devices for its 50,000 employees and some of its member populations. While Attain does get some kudos for being a straight-to-member program-as in it totally bypasses your employer-it's still a lot of information to hand over to your health insurance company. Obviously, the technology wasn't there yet to make the first few Apple Watch generations the life-saving products the company had envisioned, but with the recent introduction of an FDA-cleared ECG monitor, the wearable device is moving one big step closer to fulfilling its mission. Aetna also says no information collected will be used for underwriting, premium, or coverage decisions.
There are spots for about 250,000 to 300,000 of Aetna's 22 million members to start.
