Fitbit Moves into the Health Coaching Area with Fitbit Care

I have been posting a number of notes lately about health wearables because they are becoming increasingly important. Here's another article about the expansion of health services relating to the Fitbit, one of the earliest devices on the market: Fitbit Launches Fitbit Care, A Powerful New Enterprise Health Platform for Wellness and Prevention and Disease Management. Below is an excerpt from the article;

 Fitbit...announced Fitbit Care, a connected health platform for health plans, employers, and health systems that combines health coaching and virtual care through the new Fitbit Plus app....Fitbit Care leverages the company’s decade-plus of experience inspiring people to get healthy, combined with the clinically-proven behavior change principles of Twine Health—which Fitbit acquired earlier this year—to improve care team collaboration and health outcomes across the spectrum of care....The company also announced... that Humana selected Fitbit Care as a preferred coaching solution for its employer group segment. More than 5 million Humana members will have the potential to access Fitbit health coaching or wellness solutions through a comprehensive range of wellness programs and capabilities, such as Go365 and the Humana Employee Assistance Program (EAP)....For the first time, Fitbit Health Solutions is making health coaching available to enterprise health customers.

Here is a good example of what I will refer to here as the health wearable triad: (1) the device (Fitbit bracelet); (2) the app (Fitness Plus); and (3) healthcare services such as healthcare coaching that are driven by the data generated by the device and the app. This "health package" is proving to be irresistible to health insurance companies like Humana because of the potential to improve the health status of their customers. Theoretically, large health systems would also have an interest in promoting the adoption of wearables like Fitbit. However, I don't think that this is going to happen. The reason is that most health systems have shown little appetite for monitoring wellness and early detection of disease. Contrariwise, CVS and Walgreens have shown themselves to be deeply interested in wellness and will undoubtedly launch similar programs linked to their health destination retail stores like the previously mentioned HealthHUB (see: CVS Expands Its Healthcare Presence with Its New HealthHUB Stores).