Building a much better mousetrap

A lot of people ask me what Healthrageous is and what we provide. The answer is that we help people engage in their health in new ways and live healthier lives for the long- term. While that may sound like a bit of marketing fluff, there’s hard science, complex technology, and expert medical knowledge behind what we are doing.

In a previous post, our CEO talked about why disease management (DM) wasn’t living up to its hype. Sure, it’s easy to critique what’s not meeting expectations, but what about delivering something better? We think we have done just that. Here are a few points to help you understand what we’re doing and why we believe we’ll succeed in our twin goals of improving health and lowering healthcare costs.

• Disease management, evolved. Many of us at Healthrageous have designed and delivered DM solutions or tried to make them work. We learned what was successful and what needed improvement. At Healthrageous, we kept what was working and added what was missing. You could call it DM 2.0, but we thought it deserved a new name, which we call personalized connected health. Sure it’s another buzzword, but it’s one that reflects where the industry needs to go.
• Addressing chronic diseases and wellness. Usually, a wellness program tries to help the self-starters improve their health and lifestyle while a chronic disease program tries to help people manage difficult, lifelong conditions like diabetes or hypertension. Our users can start from either point, but they’ll find that we deal with both. People can get on board to address one particular issue, but they’ll soon see that we can help them with many other health and wellness related challenges because they’re all inter-related.
• Continuous and real-time input and feedback. Most programs take one-time data or occasional inputs to create a user profile and then deliver advice for that static profile. The lack of updated information and delay in delivery of relevant advice limits what can be accomplished. We’ve designed a system that thrives on continuous real-time input of health information – from a variety of personal devices and subjective feedback – and continually tweaks and offers the best possible advice and experience for each individual. Nothing is stale. It’s real-time health for a real-time consumer.
• A dynamic personalized experience that grows in capability. With an expanding base of users, we know about the individual as well as the masses. Our platform will recognize patterns, understand individual preferences, and make predictions to serve up an experience that has led to success for people with similar profiles. The more an individual participates, the smarter the platform gets.
• A technology base that reflects the real, heterogeneous world. Being device agnostic, we can plug in most any device that employers or individuals want to use. On the other end, we deliver our programs according to what works for each individual – via web, smartphone, email, text, or all of the above. Users define the experience and can move seamlessly between interfaces.

So what does all this really mean? Imagine Healthrageous as an automated personal advisor and coach who never sleeps, who listens to you, who keeps your information private, and who knows what you need, when you need it, and how you need it. But don’t think that we’re all about computers and automation. We plug in real people, allowing individuals to create their own social networks including friends, groups, teams and broader communities. Together, the smarts of the dynamic platform; the real-time biometric data; the automated, personalized coaching; and the support of user-defined social networks deliver an experience that is capable of overcoming the obstacles to improving health.

It may sound like science fiction, but we have it today, and it will only get better with time. We’re confident. We didn’t pick a name like A Little Bit Better Health Services. We chose Healthrageous because we think the experience that we provide is how everyone will come to expect health in the future. Bold? Sure. Cocky? We don’t think so, as we built our system on clinical trials and years of experience. What we are is confident. Give us a call and we’ll let you see just what we are doing.