Here we go again, the Big Brother push and of course could all these “motion” scores be combined and queried with medical claims and other information on hand at United?  Sure they could and we now would have an entire new bunch of risk assessment scores to imagesell about you for profit.  Just remember everything is not as it seems out there.  If you want one of these to improve your health, go buy one and use it on your own without having to send all your numbers to some server connected via Qualcomm.  The incentives here of over around $1000.00 a year are not worth a bunch of privacy.

So far this is for employers to offer to employees right now but watch the next pitch to have one of these on every Medicare Advantage insured patient they have.  Just behind IMS who had a big IPO last year, United is second in the dollar amounts they make selling medical data.  There’s no privacy statement with this device and there also appears to be yet another United fitness devices called TrioMotionFit.  If they don’t get you with one, the other one is there.  I have no doubt in this new low income United Healthcare community that soon all these folks will be hooked in as they want into every nook and cranny of one’s life, a big way to take advantage of the poor with mining all their data for sale. 

And So It Starts With Funded Health Insurance Communities to Help the Poor and Obtain A Lot More Behavior Data to Mine and Sell For United Healthcare From the Participants…

These folks at the Insurance community center are also going to be stuck with this little number:  UnitedHealthcare myMoney Connect, so if seeing a doctor at the low income housing commnity there’s all kinds of ways to be enticed to give up your data.   

How soon before they roll this out to their workers comp PBM subsidiary, Helios they just bought?  Good question maybe..

United Healthcare Buys Helios Workman’s Comp PBM and Their Other Related Businesses

Coming back on topic here, how soon will employees be getting “the stick” on this wellness program?  It’s not about making you healthier in the long run, it’s about collecting more data to sell and to score you with.  If you read the news, wearables are not what people want as we don’timage work that way and with all aspects of life wanting us to interact with “their” algorithms, we don’t have time for this on a daily basis.  The novelty with trying it usually wears off in about 2 months is what’s been published.  Do you even have a clue as to how much data employers need to give to insurance companies today in order to insure you?  It’s a lot of of course they go out and buy all kinds of data to score you as well, such as all your credit card transactions too.  Here’s one you never heard of that buys up all your credit card transactions, runs analytics to score you and sells those scores to insurers, banks, etc.

Argus Analytics Produces “Share of Credit Card” Data On Consumers - Digs Up The Dirt on Your Credit Card Behavior Patterns-US Consumer Protection Agency Is A Client-We Are Paying for Richard Cordray’s Slow Education Process

If that isn’t enough for you, check this link out below on how the drug stores and pharmacy benefit managers “score” you every time you fill a prescription on whether or not you will take your drugs.  This is a “prediction” and not actual data, so keep that in mind and IMS of course buys all of this data up as well as your insurer.

Medication Adherence Predictions Enter the World of Quantitated Justifications For Things That Are Just Not True, Members of the Proprietary “Code Hosing” Clubs Out There Destroying Your Privacy

I call it Excess Scoring of US consumers as it continues to tag more and more and more risk assessment about us to some data base and it all gets sold for profit, so look at the data from these fitness devices and do you think it will be combined with other data, you bet it will and it will be scored and sold for big corporate profits.  The market now for consumer data selling is around $200 Billion a year. 

Excess Scoring of US Consumers, US Citizens-Scored into Oblivion By Proprietary Algorithms and Formulas, Never Duplicated or Tested for Accuracy-Profits of Big Business And A White House Executive Command To Continue the Abuse..

This is really all about selling data and risk assessments and behavior change to get you to give it up so corporations can profit.  Wellness is all about education and healtheir lifestyles and having people “want” to take an interest and not force fed by dummying you down to a device that makes profits for corporate America as that’s what this is.   We really need a law to Index and License all data sellers, so we know who they are.  In case of errors and flaws with profiles created we have no way to even address correcting those errors.  With more machine learning, be ready for even more flawed scores about you to emerge. 

Index and License Data Sellers, Step One Needed for Any Consumer Privacy Efforts to Exist - Spurious Correlations and Flawed Data Risk Assessments Thrive To Erroneously Deny Access

I would say pass on this and get your own device that keeps everything “on the device” and doesn’t have a connection to send it somewhere as an alternative.  Watch for those coupons too from insurers, just another way to track what you eat as well.  This is a broken Big Brother model as again “people don’t work this way” and companies will do anything today to trick you into giving away you data, so they can profit.  BD 

Health Insurance Companies Providing Charge Cards And/Orcoupons For Healthy Foods–More Data To Collect About You And Potentially Repackage and Sell For A Profit…


LAS VEGAS (March 1, 2016) – UnitedHealthcare and Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM), through its wholly owned subsidiary Qualcomm Life, Inc., today announced UnitedHealthcare Motion™, a new wellness program that provides employees with wearable devices at no additional charge and enables them to earn up to $1,460 per year by meeting certain goals for the number of daily steps.

UnitedHealthcare Motion is being showcased for the first time at this year’s Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Conference (HIMSS), the industry-leading health information technology conference. The UnitedHealthcare Motion app will be displayed at the Qualcomm Life booth (No. 6437) at HIMSS 2016.

The wellness program and related fitness trackers are being offered initially to companies with 101 to 300 employees with a fully insured health plan. Employees and their covered spouses receive custom-designed wearable devices that track the number of steps users take each day. Unlike other wearable devices that simply track the total number of steps, the UnitedHealthcare Motion devices tabulate the total number, frequency and intensity of the steps taken, providing a more accurate and comprehensive summary of the user’s daily activity.

The data is then sent to the UnitedHealthcare Motion app, which is powered with seamless and secure connectivity through Qualcomm Life’s 2net Mobile connectivity platform. Employees can earn Health Reimbursement Account credits that can total up to $1,460 per year, while employers can obtain premium savings based on program participants’ combined results.  

http://www.uhc.com/news-room/2016-news-release-archive/wearable-devices-wellness-program

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