Apple-Aetna collaboration to develop personalized health app
Apple and Aetna have joined hands to bring out the new personalized health app Attain in order to help the users get more involved in tracking and monitoring their own well-being.
In perhaps one of the craftiest moves till date to help and entice the healthcare industry, Apple has joined forces with the health insurance service provider Aetna (part of CVS Health) in order to bring in a new app, which is called Attain. It uses Apple Watch data to provide an opening into users’ well-being. To begin with, Attain will be available on a first-come, first serve basis between 250,000 and 300,000 Aetna commercial members who will sign up to use it.
Attain will provide Aetna members, who are using an Apple Watch, with personalized health goals and recommendations together with the capability to keep track of their daily activity stages.
It will also offer incentives for users for taking action to enhance their health and well-being.
For instance, recommendations are built on clinical guidelines and might take account of notifications to acquire flu-shots, vaccinations, or refill medications when they are scheduled to come to an end, and recommending visits to the physicians if check-ups are lagging and also highlight the availability low-cost lab tests’ options.
Once users have signed up with the Attain app, they can share their information and health history with Apple, which will provide both the companies access to data that can be used afterwards for potential clinical trials or to make estimates about population health, as the companies are diving into getting more personalized recommendations from the app.
Apple’s Perspective
Both Apple and Google, whose parent company is Alphabet, have been making some good progress into personalized healthcare using wearables. Previously sometime during the first month of the year, the Alphabet’s Verily business’s wearable device was approved by the FDA for tracking and monitoring the health of the heart. Apple was granted the approval by FDA in September 2018 when it introduced a new version of the Apple Watch.
Jeff Williams who is the COO of Apple said that his company believes that people should be more involved in managing their own well-being. He also said that every day Apple gets lots of emails and letters from Apple Watch users all over the world and they share how much they have benefited by incorporating the watch into their everyday lives. The company wants to make more personalized recommendations that will help people realize their goals and live improved lives.
Executive vice president of transformation for CVS Health, Dr. Alan Lotvin, said that CVS wants to Attain to be custom-made and clinically significant for every individual in their health voyage. According to him, it is an ambitious task, and his company will evolve and improve with time in order to give the best experience to its members.
Apple has been looking into the healthcare segment at least since 2016 when Tim Cook shared that the company was considering pursuing the healthcare area.
In an interview with Fast Company, Tim said that Apple got into the health field and started looking for wellness. From there they began to think about research and the matter of patient-care, which led to the development of some other related stuff. He further said that most of the health solutions including devices and other things that are being offered by big pharma companies, their main objective is to get the repayment from an insurance provider and not helping the patients.
In the times to come, you could also expect Apple and Aetna working together to create Apple Watches into employee benefit such as computers in order to track employees’ health and bring down healthcare expenditures.
Image credit: www.attainbyaetna.com
