I went to look at what SocialKentics had to say on their website, not much so far.  Red Brick came on the scene with their big agreement with Target stores a couple years back with a wellness program that has options to use an accelerator to monitor employee actions and based on participating discounts on premiums payments made by employees was also an option they had in their overall offerings. 

Target Corporation Partners with Red Brick Wellness Program

From a prior post:

“Redbrick’s methods for tracking employees’ commitment to these health plans imageare surprisingly detailed (though they may smack a bit of Big Brother). For example, it offers an iPhone application that records progress on a person’s walking exercises and beams the data back to Redbrick’s system. Pedometers and watches that do the same are also in the works, VentureWire reports. This might sound a tad invasive, but the company says that employers have the choice whether or not to make employees prove that they are following their custom health maps.”

You can read below how Blue Cross has entered into the arena too, again algorithms to predict and change behavior with us. 

WellPoint enters wellness program partnership With Red Brick – Behavior Based Health Insurance

Behavior based wellness is a hot topic right now whether is its done via telephone communications or via devices that report data.  This is a very gray area still to be defined and as we saw yesterday with the news on PatientsLikeMe with sites that allow consumers to input information.  We don’t really know all the answers on how each system is set up, but there are spies out there that mine data and today we just don’t know who all the players are at all times.  One more item to be clear of is to watch and read the news for what company is buying who.  This is important today as it is changing the way companies operate dramatically based on data they are able to retain.  Redbrick uses many of the formulas and algorithms from Ingenix, a wholly owned subsidiary of United Healthcare.  I hope readers are starting to see the intertwining here with data and read up as everything today is not as it seems and relative to what we have known in the past. 

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Myself I have experienced a Target employee distracted by using his device, and whether or not it is tied in here, he stood in front of me for around 5 minutes totally consumed with reporting information on a smart phone, and had no idea he was standing right in front of me, a customer, looking for product on a shelf.  The point made here is the disruption created for the return of data. 

Once again it’s in the algorithms that are created to collect and report data and will it evolve to the point of having to carry a device to have insurance?  As costs go up, so do the requirements for additional data, we are seeing that now and the legal cases in some areas surrounding the use of some of the algorithms used to calculate payments for out of network charges.

From back in 2009, this is a good post with a video from a TED presentation asking where is the wisdom in healthcare and since this video was made we are seeing other elements need to come into the picture besides algorithms totally as Express Scripts is finding out. The folks that can’t afford to fill prescriptions are the ones who can’t afford it, but still they want additional algorithms to help them predict so they may find some others, but the big reason is money. 

Excessive Incentives and Rules – Where Did the Wisdom Go in HealthCare?

When you look at the board members of RedBrick you will find folks from venture capital and insurance companies on board as well as folks from Medtronic, CVS and so on.  This combination with wellness and dollars somewhat tends to put a dollar on your head as far as what your worth is according to your health when the investment side of the entire program is rolled in.  BD

RedBrick Health, an emerging leader in consumer-centric health improvement technology, announced today it has acquired Social Kinetics, a health engagement technology company.

RedBrick Health will integrate Social Kinetics’ technology into its consumer health engagement platform to create a more personalized user experience. Social Kinetics’ technology uses advanced personalization and social gaming techniques to optimize the “behavior change pathway” for each individual. The result is a unique and rewarding consumer experience for each participant

Social Kinetics was spun out of SRI International, a leading independent non-profit research institute, in 2008. The company was originally founded to create new applications for technologies developed in SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center, including software that learns through interaction with users

RedBrick Health Acquires Social Kinetics - KansasCity.com

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