One of the largest not-for-profit healthcare systems in the US, CHE Trinity Health has chosen Sharecare, the company founded by WebMD founder Jeff Arnold and television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz, to equip its 30 million patients spread across 20 states with Sharecare's portfolio of patient engagement tools. CHE will offer patients Sharecare's health risk assessment the RealAge Test, individualized wellness programs, fitness device data aggregation, facility locators, appointment schedulers, secure messaging with physicians, symptom navigator app AskMD, and more.
"If you look at the position that a lot of the not-for-profit healthcare providers are in, it's just very difficult for us to keep up in this digital health world," Scott Nordlund, Executive Vice President for Growth, Strategy and Innovation Development at CHE Trinity Health told MobiHealthNews during an interview. "Things are moving so fast and the investments, the bets, are so big that finding a best-in-class partner like Sharecare to be on this journey with us just gives us a lot of confidence that we'll be in the right place."
Sharecare's CEO Jeff Arnold told MobiHealthNews that the RealAge health risk assessment is Sharecare's registration page. Some 40 million people have opted to take the survey to find out what their "body age" is vs. their calendar age. Arnold said every solider in the US Army is required to take the RealAge Test every year.
Sharecare's biggest launch in recent years was its AskMD app, which Apple just featured briefly on-stage during remarks about HealthKit during its recent iPad launch event. AskMD was just one of three apps Apple highlighted as having integrated with HealthKit during that event. Arnold said that eventually all of Sharecare's apps and services will be integrated with HealthKit and that Millennials, in particular, will appreciate that kind of integration.
"We have a mobile-first mentality," Arnold said. "That's where the world has shifted. We have this great app, called AskMD, which we were fortunate enough to have our 'Super Bowl commercial' for last week when it was featured on-stage by Apple for the new iPad launch. [AskMD] is kind of our Watson meets Uber product. I've got a symptom and it gives you a likely cause and recommends a provider."
Arnold said that Sharecare is working on ways to passively collect more insights about people's health by monitoring their phone calls -- with their permission, of course -- and pinpointing with "very high clinical accuracy" their actual stress, and not just their perceived stress. Arnold said Sharecare is developing similar technologies unlock health information from things people are already doing with their phones and then using that data to tweak their RealAge score and share the results with providers.
Next week Sharecare is adding a "micropayments" feature to its RealAge product that will enable people to subtract two days from their RealAge by going for a run. Sharecare will generate these rewards based on data collected by third party fitness devices like those from Fitbit, Jawbone, Garmin, Omron, Withings, and others. Arnold believes this kind of feedback will help device users to make using them a sustainable habit.
"As you know a lot of people burn out on these devices," he said. "Adding content around it and feedback through RealAge is going to make it more sustainable."
