Data + Rules + Transportable = ActiveHealth PHR

I had the chance yesterday to sit down with Nita Stella (SVP of Product Management at ActiveHealth) and talk about their PHR.  It was a helpful meeting given that I spent much of today in PHR discussions.  Some of my takeaways were:

1. You have to have a PHR which pulls in your claims data.
2. You need to have rules which use the data to drive specific actions.
3. The PHR has to be transportable.

ActiveHealth has two ways that the PHR is offered: (1) through your payor and (2) direct-to-consumer (launching next week).  This works great if you originally get it through your payor and have your claims data pulled in.  Then, even if you leave, you can take the data with you.  Additionally, they are linked to HealthVault (Microsoft offering) which should help address some of the transportable issues.

Their key offering has been about using an evidence-based approach to drive decisioning using business rules so from what I know this is a key component of their offering (see more on Care Engine).

We talked a little about size and utilization.  Some of the statistics that I wrote down were:

• They have 6M eligible users (i.e., provided through their payor).
• Average use is 40% (i.e., meaning that they register and sign-in).
• Use ranges from 10% – 75% with the top client using incentives to drive adoption.
• Based on some initial data, they are getting 1.7 visits on average.
• Most of the repeat visits are due to an e-mail being triggered to let the patient know of some care alert.  [Since e-mail is not secure and you can’t send PHI (protected health information), I wonder how much more effective this would be using a different medium that included personalized information.]

She gave me a tour of the application which has a nice GUI (graphical user interface).  I liked the fact that that alerts and reminders were at the top of the page when you logged in and prompted you for an action.  Additionally, so you couldn’t just defer the action, it asks you for a reason if you choose to ignore it.  [That would be interesting data to see and track.  Why do consumers ignore opportunities and how does that vary by segment.]

I asked her what they were doing about using genetic markers and pulling in data from companies like 23andMe.   [A topic that came up in several PHR presentations today.]  She mentioned that they were talking with Rand about this and thinking through it.

The final point that I took away was that in using their business rules they are focused on pulling out the alerts and/or reminders where they have more than one marker to indicate a possibility (to eliminate false positives).

Obviously, the key to all of this is getting consumers engaged; keeping them engaged; and making the application valuable in ways that they want to use it.  A challenge for everyone in the space.