Aetna, which acquired popular mobile health app iTriage last year, has since added a number of new features and beefed up existing ones, as planned. Aetna showed off the relaunched iTriage app at an event in New York City last week as well as at the South By South West Interactive event in Austin, Texas this week. The new features and content were made possible by partnerships with Vitals and Harvard Medical School's InteliHealth.

The original iTriage app was designed and developed by two Denver-based ER doctors. It aimed to help consumers make better healthcare decisions by providing relevant medical info, transparency around quality, and info and access to local healthcare facilities. As of August 2011 the app included more than 1,000 medication listings and what was described as at the time "an updated provider search function".

The latest version of the iTriage app includes another update for the provider search function. Users can now search for providers based on ratings -- thanks to the Vitals partnership. Providers can also be sorted by gender, languages spoken, years of experience, and distance from the consumer's house or office.

The relaunched iTriage also sends news and alerts to its users as well as updated content for a number of additional diseases and average cost data, thanks to Aetna's partnership with HMS' InteliHealth.

iTriage has also been due to add appointment booking for some time: It acquired AppointmentCity.com last year months before MobiHealthNews broke the news that Aetna had acquired it. The addition of appointment booking could pit iTriage up against cash-flush appointment booking company ZocDoc. With iTriage users can book appointment for physicians who can best address their symptoms, according to Aetna.

While many of these updates were fairly obvious, expected, or minor, the addition of prescription refill reminders is an interesting departure. If built out, this function could be used for much, much more.