Welltok's Cafewell platform.
Welltok, creator of an online and mobile "social health management" platform, has acquired healthcare incentive design and management firm IncentOne. Denver-based Welltok plans on integrating IncentOne technology into its CafeWell platform, giving population health managers a more convenient way to offer consumers personalized rewards for healthy behaviors.
"It allows you to match any action by any consumer to any reward value in any currency, whether that's dollars or prizes," Welltok CEO Jeff Margolis told MobiHealthNews. Because the population managers that use IncentOne generally work for payers or self-insured corporations, rewards for taking steps to improve one's own health could include reductions in insurance premiums or patient co-pays, Margolis said.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act allows employee-sponsored health plans to cut premiums by up to 30 percent for members' participation in health and wellness programs and as much as 50 percent for successfully completing smoking cessation programs.
Social health management is about "activating consumers to be engaged in their own healthcare," according to Margolis. "It has to be social. It has to be both online and mobile. It has to have gaming. It has to be rewarding both intrinsically and extrinsically," explained Margolis, founder and former CEO of healthcare management software vendor TriZetto Group.
CafeWell, which Margolis said is for "health optimization," pulls together fitness, nutrition, medical devices and online coaching to help consumers to "make themselves as healthy as they can be." The platform already had incentives and rewards built in, but Margolis said the IncentOne acquisition allows for better management and more flexibility in rewards programs.
Welltok reported that IncentOne has designed more than 4,000 incentive programs in its seven years of operation, delivering upwards of 36 million rewards to some 2 million consumers. Margolis said Welltok already has relationships with three of the nation's five largest private health insurers, though he would not name them. The company previously disclosed a relationship with Aetna subsidiary Coventry Health Care.
Welltok raised $18.7 million in private equity earlier this year.
