UnitedHealth Group will join in strategic partnerships with three health technology companies that offer mobile products and services designed to help improve consumers’ health and well-being, Jill Gilbert reports at digitalhealth.com.
The solutions will be demonstrated at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.
UnitedHealth Group’s new business partners — CareSpeak Communications, Lose It! and Fitbit —help users find information on smartphones and other mobile devices.
“Technology is playing an increasingly important role in the way that people take control of their health. UnitedHealth Group is committed to developing innovative solutions, and we look forward to working with such creative partners as CareSpeak Communications, Lose It! and Fitbit to help people live healthier lives,” Rick Jelinek, executive vice president and CEO of Emerging Business Group at UnitedHealth Group, told Gilbert.
CareSpeak Communications’ medication and disease management application helps patients manage their health using two-way text messaging on their mobile phones to text their blood glucose levels, blood pressure, weight and other data to their healthcare providers, according to the story. The CareSpeak system is designed for four different user groups, including individuals who want to self-manage their own health, a pharmaceutical company or pharmacy which provides health alerts to their customers, health benefits providers who help plan participants manage their health, and clinicians who want to manage their patients’ health, according to Gilbert’s story.
Lose It!, created by FitNow Inc., is a mobile app and website that helps consumers manage their weight by “tracking their progress, offering peer support, and providing caloric and nutritional information on what they eat,” Gilbert writes. The mobile app is available for iPhones and Android devices.
We’ve all been told that exercise can count as anything mobile that we do. Now Fitbit offers a sleek, wireless tracker that counts how many steps a user takes, and how many stairs he climbs, while calculating how many calories he burns. But that’s not all. According to Gilbert, the mobile device also tracks how long and well you sleep and the information can be uploaded wirelessly to Fitbit.com, where consumers can analyze their physical activity.
This is a growing marketplace. Forecasters predicted the GPS fitness watch market alone would reach 10,000,000 shipments last year.
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Deborah DiSesa Hirsch is an award-winning health and technology writer who has worked for newspapers, magazines and IBM in her 20-year career. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Rich Steeves
