Fitbit’s corporate wellness offering, which became a HIPAA compliant platform a little over a month ago, has added a premium software feature to its program, called Corporate Challenges. The move adds additional momentum to Fitbit's enterprise-focused business, which recently added Target as a customer.
The company also announced a number of new enterprise customers including Aon Service Corporation, Barclays, BMC Software, Boston College, Emory University and Emory Healthcare, GoDaddy.com, and Gonzaga University. In the last four months, Fitbit has signed around 20 large employer customers. Update: A Fitbit spokesperson told MobiHealthNews that the company added about 20 large employer (500+ employees) customers in the past four months, not 20 employer customers total. The total number of recently added employer customers is a larger but undisclosed number, she said.
The new corporate challenges feature, which will be available in Q4 2015 on iOS and Windows, provides organizations with the tools to design, create, and run custom activity challenges within the Fitbit Program Management Dashboard. Program administrators will be able to notify employees when a challenge launches and motivate teams during the challenges with status updates and rankings.
“In 2015, we’ve seen companies of all sizes and industries turn to Fitbit Wellness to support the development of their wellness programs,” Amy McDonough, vice president and general manager of Fitbit Wellness, said in a statement. “This not only points to Fitbit’s credibility and leadership in the corporate wellness space, but also serves as an indicator that organizations are making corporate wellness a top business priority.”
Fitbit also shared details about its deal with Barclays. More than 75,000 employees in the US and UK across Barclay's Investment Bank, Barclaycard, Personal and Corporate Bank, Corporate Functions, as well as Operations and Technology teams be able to purchase a subsidized Fitbit. The company eventually plans to roll the program out to all 140,000 Barclays employees.
In mid-September, Fitbit inked a deal with Target, which allows Target employees to get a free Fitbit Zip or to get a more expensive Fitbit device subsidized by the company. Target said it would work with Fitbit Wellness on not just the devices, but also the backend software that allows corporate to compare the activity of different employee populations and run challenges and competitions that encourage employees to move more.
At the time, McDonough said Fitbit Wellness has been around almost since the beginning, but is lately one of the fastest growing parts of the company.
Fitbit's new Corporate Challenges offering is somewhat similar to Jawbone's Up for Groups, which the rival company launched at the end of last year.
