MassMutual Explores Health Data From Wearables
But you aren't the only one who is interested in these data points such as your step count and hours of sleep per night. Just like car insurance companies offer discounts to drivers who allow monitoring of their safe driving habits, health and life insurance companies may one day offer discounts to those who comply with good health habits.
MassMutual Explores Health Data from Wearables
Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company or MassMutual is one of them. This century-plus old company is looking to pioneer the analytics of health data from wearable devices to predict long term mortality risk -- whether someone will die in 20 years or 30 years or more. Those with healthy habits could earn a health discount on their premiums.
But even though MassMutual's work with data from wearable device is not something that's hit the market yet, the company has been working for years with health data and machine learning algorithms to improve its risk assessments.
"Insurance companies like ours are sitting on gold mines worth of data because we've been around for 100 years," Ross said. "That data is incredibly rich in terms of health indicators such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure, height, weight -- hundreds of data points for every person. The problem was that it was all on paper and in legacy systems."
No actual numbers are available regarding the return on investment, but the success of the program can probably be measured by the growth of the team over the last 6 years, going from just a few data scientists to about 100 of these highly compensated professionals. There's also Ross's qualitative endorsement.
Ross's team didn't deploy a commercial platform for this work. Rather, they cobbled together their own platform from the rich set of open source technologies available for data science, ones that these data scientists were more accustomed to using in their previous university jobs.
Traditional mental health providers make you wait weeks to see someone. With Spring Health, members can see a therapist in an average of just two days. In addition to therapy, members have access to comprehensive support including self-guided digital exercises, coaching, and more, to prevent and treat a range of conditions from sub-clinical concerns to high-acuity issues.
Biofourmis is a health analytics platform designed to analyze physiology data from clinical-grade wearables. The company's platform uses artificial intelligence to integrate and analyze continuous physiology data from clinical-grade wearables to detect personalized patterns and predict clinical exacerbation in advance of a critical event, enabling medical professionals to intervene days before a critical event and providing better outcomes for patients. Biofourmis utilizes machine learning, integrated biometric data and FDA-cleared analytics to streamline patient care.
With a long personal history of MSK injuries including several leg surgeries, Dan has long been passionate about improving outcomes for musculoskeletal disorders. Originally from Miami, Dan pursued a PhD in the medical sciences at the University of Oxford (currently paused), founding the Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable and OneStart, a large healthcare accelerator program. As CEO, Dan brings startup technology experience and healthcare expertise to Hinge Health.
Growing up across the world, Christian dreamed about a career in the NBA, but alas that was not to be. So, he decided on a wildly successful career in the hearing health and professional services industry instead. Over two decades, Christian has been instrumental in growing the hearing health and professional services market for leading global companies. We lured him from Copenhagen with the promise of a try-out with the Golden State Warriors.
Eric is co-founder and CEO of Bloomlife, a digital health company designing the future of prenatal care with technology to improve the health of moms and babies. Eric brings a unique perspective on the needs, opportunities, and challenges in emerging healthcare technologies and delivery models informed by multi-disciplinary technical expertise gained through business development in consumer and medical markets. Prior to co-founding Bloomlife, Eric served as senior business development manager at IMEC leading sales and partnership activities in North America. In his 3 years leading sales activities in North America, Eric generated $25M+ in revenue from partnerships covering next gen sequencing, remote patient monitoring, hyper spectral imaging, and mixed signal chip design. Eric earned his BSc in Bioengineering from Cornell and his MSc and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from UCLA. He is (co)-author of 14 scientific publication and 9 patents.
Eran Ofir is the CEO and Co-Founder of Somatix, a real-time gesture detection platform for effective healthcare intervention,utilizing sensors built into a range of wearables to remotely detect, analyze, gain insights and act on massive volumes of body motion data. Eran has 20 years of experience in executive roles with multinational companies, where he established and led business units at Orange, AOL Mobile, Amdocs, Convergys and NCR. Over the last decade, Eran has lived and worked in Israel, South Africa, China and the US, selling software platforms, hardware, services and consulting to customers in telecom, internet, retail, utilities, financial services and healthcare sectors. Eran is a Tel-Aviv University graduate in Electrical Engineering (BSc) and Finance-Marketing MBA.
DialCare announces two new consumer plans. PR Newswire, March 25, 2020. The two new consumer plans include access to both physician and mental wellness services to individuals concerned about coronavirus (COVID-19) as well as other illnesses and mental health concerns. DialCare Physician Access is a telemedicine service for non-emergency illnesses and general care. DialCare Mental Wellness is designed to provide mental health assistance from licensed mental health professionals via phone or video consultations.
Mutual of Omaha to offer Mutual Perks to customers. Press release, February 25, 2020. Mutual Perks is a new suite of value-added offers and discounts from leading service providers nationwide for customers of individual life and select health products. The discounted wellness services including massage, chiropractic, and acupuncture services, and a low-cost gym membership.
The Silver&Fit program offers industry-leading new features to keep seniors healthy and fit in 2020. PR Newswire, January 6, 2020. The Silver&Fit program is offering additional features for Medicare-eligible members nationwide. The program now offers on-demand group exercise classes, health coaching, and a Silver&Fit app. The program also offers an advanced Connected! program that aggregates exercise data across a number of wearable fitness devices.
Insurers are using data analytics tools such as LexisNexis Risk Solutions, TransUnion TrueRisk Life Score and MassMutual's LifeScore360 to cull data and supply a mortality score from a wealth of sources.
Think of those scores as the mortality version of credit scores in the mortgage loan process. They have developed over the past five years, and in the case of LexisNexis, include information from more than 20,000 databases.
Unconventional data sources range from census information, public filings (homeownership records, bankruptcies, property deeds, tax filings and licensures), credit information and geographical data (community-level mortality, addiction and smoking data).
Many consumers view the thought of their insurer scrolling through their Instagram posts and shopping histories as a violation of privacy. Others balk at reporting biometric data from their Apple Watch, even for a discount.
The industry needs data, but it also needs to know from where that data originates. And as the New York regulator warned, insurers need to be transparent in disclosing the reason for a rejection or other adverse action in accelerated underwriting.
While insurers explore more alternative data, they continue to venture further into information sources that can be easily and quickly obtained that won't pose regulatory issues. Electronic health records, including individual clinician records, and financial information purchased from third parties are increasingly a common source.
When president Clinton opened GPS data to the public, the ensuing translation of space-age, futuristic technology into consumer products enabled the weekend warrior to experience and deploy an entirely new way of measuring and contextualizing training. We have reached critical mass in this market. Now that the most casual of 5k racers is sporting a GPS-enabled watch, the question is, what is the future in wearables and monitoring? Many tracking devices have recently been under scrutiny for accuracy, according to research at the 2015 American College of Sports Medicine Conference, but the potent question is less about the precision of the sensors and more about the value of the data in driving and improving human performance. Interestingly, what started out as a seemingly long shot with GPS athlete tracking from satellites is rapidly combining with body mechanics and blood analysis, and entering the molecular level. Sports data and sports analytics are not a fad and are here to stay; and the casual fan will start seeing more live athlete data in the years to come, weaving data sets from the satellite to the microscope.
Data is the new oil, and now that wearables are affordable and widely available...well, we are drowning in numbers; some of them valid and some of them, perhaps, just ornamental. More and more professional teams are using measurement devices, ranging from the latest smart fabrics to tiny sensors on athletic shoes to collect data. As recently as five years ago, professional teams were the only ones having access to lab-grade data, but the consumer market is evolving so fast that the average joes are now caught up to the pros. Going to a sporting goods department store and picking out the right heart rate monitor can be overwhelming, not to mention the dozens of web or mobile platforms that promise better ways to use the data rushing out like a geyser. Taking pause for a moment, thoughtful consideration needs to be given to any data we are collecting to validate and calibrate their true value. Data in itself is not meaningful unless a proactive change or intervention is possible and choices can be made, supported, repeated, and supported again. The observable and visualized data must equate to a possible impact we can and want to track or measure. The principle of the smallest worthwhile change is growing with sport scientists for a reason; because coaches and athletes want to know - is the effort worth it? Can the data collected, possibly requiring a lot of time and effort, actually make a difference on the clock or on the field? Teams and national training centers are spending millions of dollars on athlete monitoring systems, sport scientists, and the latest technologies, but is it working? 041b061a72