UnitedHealth grows digital health business in Minneapolis
For several years, employer health plans have hired its
Based in
“We built out a suite of capabilities all around this idea that engaging with the health care system should be no different than engaging with any other industry from an online perspective,” said
The message sounds like something
Many carriers are making plays for the digital health market, which encompasses a wide variety of tools accessed on computers and mobile devices that patients can use for everything from healthy living to making efficient use of the health care system.
Last year,
“They’re all doing the same thing,” said
Hundreds of companies, from startups to large players, are working on elements of digital health platforms, said
In
What analysts are waiting to see,
“The starting line is not putting technology together. The starting line is really adoption,” he said. “Once we start to get adoption, then we can really start to look to even see if there are any health outcomes that are measurable.”
Rally’s digital health platform is incorporated in coverage for people with health insurance from UnitedHealthcare. But because Rally is part of Optum, its services also can be purchased by other health insurers for use by their subscribers.
From the start,
“We’re in a different location. A different vibe. A different approach,” Ulfers said. “We maintained the culture by maintaining a degree of separation.”
At the same time,
Rally started as a wellness platform where people could take health surveys, connect with a coach or fitness program and participate in group health challenges. About four years ago, Rally expanded the platform to include tools to help people shop and make decisions about care by displaying information on prices, quality and consumer ratings.
Its latest digital health platform makes it easier for employers to pull everything together in one place, including information about all health plan options. That’s important, Ulfers said, because some large employers will have multiple plans and, in some cases, multiple insurance carriers.
During a recent demonstration, Ulfers showed how health plan members in
To display cost information,
“Because we have this sensitive data, we have very specific things that we do to make sure that we’ve got lots of process and controls around it,” Ulfers said. One example: Rally stores data in a cloud run by Amazon, rather than the Optum cloud used by the rest of
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