Help Consumers Take Charge of their Health – Accept the Aetna CarePass Challenge

Do you want to play a role in making healthcare more convenient? Are you up for a challenge? Technology is making every aspect of managing our lives more convenient – including our health.  And mobile apps are helping many of us manage our health and wellness, from tracking fitness activity and calorie counting, to finding the right healthcare providers and more.  However, the more apps you use, the more scattered your health data becomes, and the more fragmented your health experiences can be. Aetna is committed to adding convenience and clarity back into the healthcare equation, but it needs the developer community to make it add up.

Solutions to aid medication adherence are a particularly critical need in today’s healthcare landscape. To help drive the next generation of apps that will help people take their medications as prescribed, Aetna is inviting developers to join its Aetna CarePass Medication Reminder Challenge, which offers $100,000 in prize money to be shared by two winning developers.

You can register for the Challenge here.

This challenge speaks to Aetna’s commitment to developing game-changing technologies that will make navigating healthcare simpler and more convenient.  To meet this commitment, Aetna has introduced CarePass, a free, secure, personal cloud for your health and wellness data.  It follows you on your healthcare journey, syncing data that you choose to share between some of your favorite health and wellness apps and your secure cloud.

For developers, we launched CarePass Developer, a portal that offers unique and powerful APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) from Aetna, the US Department of Health and Human Services, and other innovators in the health and wellness community, like GoodRx, to help developers and health technologists turn their concepts into exciting new apps.

CarePass is about the “4 C’s” of consumer health engagement:

· Control.  You own your own health and wellness data – and you should be the one to decide how it is used, and by whom.

· Convenience.  You should be able to securely access your health and wellness data from anywhere with an Internet connection.  It should not be locked away in paper files, computers, or individual mobile devices.

· Connections.  Imagine being able to link your fitness behaviors to your nutritional habits, or your medical symptoms to the exact right doctor for you.  Having your data connected will open up a world of insights into your own health and wellness.

· Community.  Find others like you who fit―and choose to share-similar health and wellness profiles, and reach out to those peers to find recommendations for the health and wellness tools that are best tailored to your life.

We encourage developers to promote the “4 Cs” of consumer health engagement, and use the CarePass Developer services to take on the Aetna CarePass Medication Reminder Challenge.

So, register for the Challenge today and join us for an informational webinar on August 1 to learn more about how you can develop the winning app.  Will you take the Challenge? What do you think are the greatest challenges for medication adherence?

Martha L. Wofford is the vice president of Aetna’s CarePass Platform