Mobile, wearable, mHealth monitoring devices are a key element of many employer fitness programs and clinical laboratories can play an important role in their success
For years Dark Daily has encouraged clinical laboratories to get involved in corporate wellness programs as a way to support their local communities and increase revenues. Now, leveraging the popularity of mobile health (mHealth) wearable devices, UnitedHealthcare (UHC) has found a new way to incentivize employees participating in the insurer’s Motion walking program. UHC is offering free Apple Watches to employees willing to meet or exceed certain fitness goals.
This is the latest wrinkle in a well-established trend of incentivizing
beneficiaries to meet healthcare goals, such as stopping smoking, losing
weight, reducing cholesterol, and lowering blood pressure.
It’s an intriguing gamble by UHC and presents another opportunity for medical laboratories that are equipped to monitor and validate participants’ progress and physical conditions.
How to Get a Free Apple
Watch and FIT at the Same Time
CNBC reported that UHC’s Motion program participants number in the hundreds of thousands. And, according to a UHC news release, they can earn cash rewards up to $1,000 per year. The idea is that participants pay off the cost of their “free” Apple Watch one day at a time by achieving activity goals set in UHC’s FIT tracking method. Those goals include:
Frequency:
500 steps in seven minutes; six times a day, at least one hour apart;
Intensity:
3,000 steps in 30 minutes; and,
Tenacity:
10,000 steps in one day.
“UnitedHealthcare Motion is part of our consumer-focused strategy that is driving toward a simple, integrated, mobile-centric ecosystem that delivers value to consumers,” said Steve Nelson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in a news release. “Smartwatches and activity trackers stand alongside transparency in physician selection and medical costs, easy virtual visits with healthcare professionals, and digital coaching and online wellness programs, all of which are designed to support consumers in enhancing their health and improving how they navigate the healthcare system.” Clinical laboratories play a key role in this healthcare strategy. (Graphic copyright: UnitedHealthcare.)
Though hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries are eligible to participate in UHC’s Motion program through their employers, only 45% of those eligible have enrolled in Motion, Fox Business reported.
UHC hopes the offer of a free Apple Watch (which has
applications to track minutes of exercise, a heart rate monitor, and more) will
encourage people to sign up and then progress toward the Motion program’s FIT
goals.
As people meet these goals, they earn $4/day toward the cost
of the Apple Watch. Participants, who do not take enough steps in a six-month period
could be required to repay a percentage of the cost of the smartwatch.
Motion participants who already own an Apple Watch can still
earn up to $1,000 per year in cash rewards for achieving the FIT goals.
“UnitedHealthcare Motion’s success affirms that wearables can play an important role in helping people enhance their well-being and supporting and motivating them to stay engaged in their health,” said Rebecca Madsen, Chief Consumer Officer of UnitedHealthcare, in the UHC news release. (Photo copyright: University of Pennsylvania.)
Impact of mHealth
Programs/Technology Not Clear
Chronic diseases, including diabetes and heart disease, annually cost the US healthcare system $190 billion and employers $126 billion in lost productivity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
However, some researchers say it’s too early for mHealth
wearables, medication apps, physician virtual engagement, and other digital tools
(many launched within the past five to seven years) to effect key indicators,
such as obesity, life expectancy, and smoking cessation.
“Some of the benefits of these new tools won’t be realized for a long time. It’s really hard to tease out the impact of digital health. Maybe we’re helping people, but we’re not detecting it,” James Murphy, MD, Associate Professor, University of California San Diego Health and radiation oncologist, told CNBC.
Nevertheless, it behooves medical laboratories to develop
procedures for analyzing and reporting data that could impact people who use
wearable mHealth devices to participate in employer wellness programs.
For example, labs could contact insurance companies with
information about biomarkers that provide views into an individual’s progress
toward personal health goals.
Data-driven recommendations from medical laboratories about
tests for chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes will likely be
welcomed by payers.
Consumer demand for health trackers combined with other smartwatch capabilities is driving a trend away from simple health trackers and toward more complex devices, such as the Apple Watch, for their more powerful capabilities
It is still an open question as to whether clinical laboratories will experience an onrush of patient test data streaming at them from healthcare consumer portals and mobile devices. The popularity of wearable fitness/medical technology has been widely touted in the media. Predictions have been that these devices—when coupled with smartphone and tablet applications (apps)—would generate substantial volumes of digital patient data that would be useful for medical laboratories to capture and add to the clinical lab test data of the patients they serve.
But will these predictions of a flood of data from wearable devices become reality? Is this a trend about which medical laboratories should be concerned? Recent statistics provide some insight into these questions. For example, the sales numbers for wearable devices are significant.
Smartwatches Gaining Ground in Wearable Fitness Market
In 2016, 102.4 million wearable devices were sold, which was a 25% increase over the previous year, according to Smart Insights, a publisher for marketers. Now, several sports apparel companies, such as Adidas and Under Armour, are either launching smartwatches with health/fitness-related software and activity trackers, or eliminating their digital fitness business units altogether.
And according to MobiHealthNews, “[today’s] landscape looks awfully different.
“I think the industry is still struggling to find real, meaningful points of reference with consumers,” Dan Ledger, Principal and Founder, Path Collaborative, a Massachusetts consulting firm, told MobiHealthNews. “You hear anecdotes of people who had Fitbit (NYSE:FIT) and lost weight. But it hasn’t really been a success as a market product like a smartphone—like a lot of these companies were expecting when they were reading the tea leaves four or five years ago.”
For example, Adidas reassigned employees working in the fitness watch and sensor-enabled footwear departments to other areas, according to the Portland Business Journal. “We are integrating digital across all areas of our business and will continue to grow our digital expertise but in a more integrated way,” an Adidas spokesperson told Just-Style.
And, Nike announced its intention late last year to abandon the wearables market altogether. “It wasn’t authentic to who we were,” Jordan Rice, Senior Director of Nike NXT Smart Systems Engineering, told MobiHealthNews.
Meanwhile, Under Armour announced in 2017 that it planned to eliminate the UA HealthBox, a wearable device that offered a connected activity tracker, heart rate monitor, and smart scale tools, according to MHealth Spot. Instead, the publication reported, Under Armour was partnering with Samsung on fitness apps:
MyFitnessPal;
MapMyFitness;
Endomondo; and,
UA Record.
More Consumers Strapping on Smartwatches
Fitbit recently released the Fitbit Ionic Watch. According to Fitbit’s website, features include:
Personal coaching;
Heart rate monitor;
All-day activity tracking;
Sleep stages monitoring; and more.
The smartwatch may be the new “smart” way to go, compared to simple activity trackers. Smartwatch manufactures are partnering with biometric monitoring app developers (such as Apple Watch and IBM Watson Health, shown above) to service consumers who need to monitor, capture, and distribute their critical health data. (Photo copyright: Alexey Boldin/Shutterstock.)
Consumer Reports, citing NPD Group market data, noted smartwatches are increasingly becoming the device-of-choice for consumers who gather fitness data. Besides tracking heart rate, some smartwatch apps also release notifications about accomplishment of goals, enable access to e-mail, and more.
Consumer Reports noted:
Smartwatches were used by 17% of US adults in the first quarter of 2015, and the remaining 83% in the demographic used activity trackers;
Smartwatch use jumped to 38% by the fourth quarter of 2017; and,
Smartwatches will rise to 48% of new market purchases by the fourth quarter this year.
Hardware is Hard
Fitness wearable devices have long been touted by the media for their potential to stream critical health data directly to physicians, to patients’ electronic health records, and to medical laboratories. Dark Daily foresaw in 2016 that, when paired with a smartphone or table computer, the momentum of the fitness wearables trend was substantial. For this reason, clinical laboratory managers and pathologists would want to stay current with these developments. However, today it appears companies offering wearable monitoring devices could be finding it more difficult than anticipated to capture the attention of consumers and leverage what the devices do.
In the end, sports apparel companies are not leaving the digital fitness space entirely, but simply adjusting to new consumer demands. Clinical laboratory leaders will want to keep watch on these developments as the trend evolves. The outcome could alter how patient data enters the pathology workflow.
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