For Episode 14, Jessica DaMassa asks me all the questions she can about health & technology in 2 minutes. On the docket today, Walmart & Humana, MyFitnessPal’s huge data breach, and Apple in health tech (again!)–Matthew Holt
MyFitnessPal Works If You Use It
You may have seen some news regarding a study MyFitnessPal recently did with UCLA.
I wanted to take a minute to address this study, since we participated in it directly. We are excited that we got to work with some very smart people to answer a question we also wanted to know the answer to. We jumped at the opportunity to find out—is having your physician introduce you to the app and help you sign up enough to kickstart a health journey?
What we learned is that just introducing people to MyFitnessPal wasn’t enough. People have to be ready and willing to do the hard work.
The app itself does work—if you use it. Our own data and the data from the study show that the more you log on, the more you use the app, the more success you will see. Users that logged in the most lost the most weight. In fact, we already know that 88% of users who log for 7 days lose weight.
We make tools designed to make it as clear and simple as possible for you to see the path to achieving your fitness goals. We are not, however, making a magic bullet—because there is no magic bullet. Ultimately, you’re the one who has to do the work.
65 Million People Lost Weight With MyFitnessPal?
65 million people lost weight with MyFitnessPal. Really?
Now, let’s see, according to Gallup, 18% of American adults are at their ideal weight, so we’ll assume they don’t want to lose weight.
That means 82% of American adults or about 198 million people might want lose weight. Thus, based on My Fitness Pal’s headline boast, their market penetration is nearly a third of the adults who need to lose weight, which is just boffo if you are a potential advertiser.
Or, is it? Observe, my dear Watson, as we play 20 questions with My Fitness Pal:
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How many of these people were repeat customers?
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How often did they come back?
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At what time intervals?
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When they came back, how much weight had they (re) gained?
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How much weight did the average user lose?Continue reading…
Interview with Adam Pellegrini Walgreens, VP of Digital Health
In less than one week, the Health 2.0 8th Annual Fall Conference will feature over 200 LIVE demos, 150 speakers, on over 60 panels and sessions focused on innovative solutions within health care technology. Indu Subaiya, CEO & Co-Founder of Health 2.0 interviewed Adam Pellegrini, VP of Digital Health of Walgreens ahead of his appearance at the 8th Annual Health 2.0 Fall Conference. Adam will be participating in the Monday main stage panel “Consumer Tech and Wearables: Powering Healthy Lifestyles.” In this interview, Adam gives insight into Walgreens innovative API creating the seamless user experience.
Indu Subaiya: So you are leading up a number of very exciting initiatives at Walgreens in terms of digital health. Let’s begin by talking a bit about the API program and the developer ecosystem that you’ve built.
Adam Pellegrini: Absolutely. So Walgreens has been offering a very robust API program for quite some time – this idea that our stores in the online space should be really an omni-channel user experience. If you think about our stores, our stores actually have a lot of partners that actually have products in the stores.
So really, our API program is really about partners. It’s about bringing and facilitating the digital ecosystem together via API. So for us in the Health API space, it’s about how do we help all of these different apps leverage the ingredient technologies that Walgreens has created to create a seamless friction as user experience.
IS: You mentioned that the Health API has drawn a lot of members within the Health 2.0 community. Can you tell us a little bit about some partners there and how this is then connected to your Balance Rewards program?
AP: GenieMD is actually one of our partner apps that leverage our Refill by Scan, our personal health app that goes on both Androids and iPhones. And some of that could be really convenient and add a value to their app by embedding the API that we have for refilling prescriptions, the Refill by Scan.