Digital Health and Wellness – New forms of customer engagement

Digital health and personalized wellness is about to reach escape velocity and transform the way millions of people  achieve their health and fitness goals. Self-tracking, quantified self,  connected fitness and personalized notifications (customer engagement) is the new frontier.  What was considered visionary a few years is now possible.

Consumer Health and Wellness management is a huge market opportunity in the U.S:

• $2.6T – $2.8T annual spend on healthcare in USA, 18% of GDP in 2010, up from 5% in 1960, and 2x OECD average;
• 100MM Americans (30%) of Americans considered obese in 2012, up from 15% in 1990.
• $147Bln estimated medical costs associated with obesity in 2008, up from $79Bln in 1998
• Diseases like diabetes currently affects more than 8 percent of the U.S. population, at a cost of $245 billion annually, and is projected to rise sharply over the coming decades due to obesity and an aging population.

In 2014,  the Affordable Care Act and readmission penalties, we saw the transformation of healthcare in the US market to a value based reimbursement model impacting payers, providers, pharmacies, technology vendors and more. The next phase of evolution of healthcare delivery is around getting customers more interested in managing their own health by changing lifestyles and healthier living.

(Source: American Heart Association, Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2012, OECD)

Trends Driving the Connected Health and Consumerization

Preventative healthcare is really about the getting the participant to be active in their own healthcare management and change behavior.  The change around consumer driven healthcare spend are staggering:

• IDC expects the market for wearable devices will reach 114.0 million units shipped in 2018, representing a $33.7 billion worldwide revenue opportunity.  Compare this to   2014, shipments of wearable devices more than tripled compared to the prior year, reaching a total of 21.0 million units shipped.

• Consumers spent over $200 billion in 2014 on health and fitness services  (industry sources – Fitbit S1)

Virtual wellness coaches, loyalty incentives, social gamification and personalized goals are all elements of this growing digital ecosystem.  Technology is a key enabler of this ecosystem with advances in wearable (e.g., Apple Watch) and sensor computing (e.g., clip-on activity trackers).