RunKeeper – The Health Care Blog

Interview with Adam Pellegrini Walgreens, VP of Digital Health

Sep 16, 2014

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.

Download Two of These And Call Me In the Morning

May 28, 2014• 5

By BRIAN LEVINE, MD

When it comes to discussing exercise with friends, family and patients, it seems that many of us are at a loss for words. What kind of exercise should we recommend? How much exercise is enough? How much is too much? How do I know that my patient is actually exercising? How do I prescribe exercise?

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. adults should engage in moderately intense physical activity for a minimum of 150 minutes each week; this is equivalent to 30 minutes a day, 5 days per week [1]. While it is relatively easy to keep track of the duration and frequency of exercise, it is much more difficult to quantify the intensity of an activity, let alone ensure that the activity is “moderate” for the entire 30 minutes.

In fact, in a 2008 study of women’s understanding of “moderate-intensity” of physical activity as presented in the popular media, the authors found it is not enough to simply hear and read a description of physical activity, but that it requires practice [2].

So, what are we to do? Should we have our patients log their daily activities? Should we have our patients show us sign-in sheets from the local gym?

It turns out that the dilemma of how to quantify physical activity has been a hot topic for more than 50 years. In 1965, a Japanese inventor developed the first pedometer to give people the opportunity to meet measurable goals and, thus, increase their physical activity. The device was called the Manpo-Kei (meaning “10,000 steps meter”) and it was based on research by Dr. Yoshiro Hatano that demonstrated that 10,000 steps per day allowed for a proper balance between the traditional Japanese caloric intake and the activity-based caloric expenditure of walking approximately five miles per day (the average person’s stride length is approximately 2.5 feet long, therefore 2,000 steps/mile) [3].