Can Apple Learn From Aetna's Failure?
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
What does Aetna’s decision to discontinue CarePass mean for Apple’s HealthKit?
Health insurance giant Aetna announced it plans to discontinue its CarePass consumer health data platform by the end of 2014. The app was designed to help users track their health and fitness by combining information into a single dashboard.
"You can have a fitness profile that normalizes the data so it gets all the steps and miles and time duration," pulling the information from different apps, Aetna Vice President Martha Wofford told InformationWeek when the app launched in 2013. "And the same with nutrition: you can use multiple different apps to track your caloric intake and so on."
CarePass provides cloud storage teamed with application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect and receive data from a variety of health wearables and apps. With it, an individual can store their running app data, weight numbers from connected scale, steps from their Fitbit, and data from their diet app. Emerging platforms from Apple, Google, and Samsung all promise to provide the same services.
CarePass did not flourish because it failed to connect with Aetna members and other consumers. “When you talk to people associated with it you hear that they couldn’t get the user numbers, so they repositioned it for employers, but that apparently didn’t work either,” Forrester analyst Peter Mueller said. “The market wasn’t ready for it.”
Aetna data reveals that 100 million people have downloaded apps that integrate with the CarePass platform, but there are no tallies of how many Aetna members actually access the CarePass platform.
“My own quick speculation is that they decided that competing with HealthKit is a losing proposition,” says Doximity chief executive Jeff Tangney. “At the end of the day, CarePass was designed to make Aetna more attractive for patients choosing Aetna versus United Healthcare and others. It probably didn’t work that well, so they’re giving up.”
Aetna's decision to phase out CarePass is reflective of the struggles of mHealth developers, says Daniel Ruppar, global programming director of connected health at Frost & Sullivan. "The closure of Aetna's CarePass illustrates the struggles companies in the digital health space are experiencing and facing in developing and sustaining users, and business models to scale," he says. "Companies are still learning how to effectively engage consumer and professional users. They're also trying to determine what works in terms of scaled solutions outside of the rampant piloting which goes on for mobile and other progressive technology markets including telehealth and remote patient monitoring."
One other major challenge that CarePass – and all other health data platforms – had to face was how to analyze and package the data in a meaningful and useful way for doctors and caregivers. Aetna apparently had big dreams for CarePass, betting on the fact that its members would start tracking a bunch of data on CarePass, get healthier, and start using fewer health care services. Unfortunately, caregivers couldn’t use the data to help keep tabs on their patients’ health. “It wasn’t built to integrate with the electronic health record,” Forrester’s Mueller said.
There’s a possibility that the CarePass platform will become associated with Aetna’s iTriage app, which currently has people input symptoms or health questions and get answers on their phone. It also helps them find medications, diseases, and medical office locations. The spokesman said Aetna has plans to expand iTriage, possibly to include certain telemedicine applications.