Connected Health Advocate Seeks Wider Audience

It seems like every other physician I meet these days has a tech-powered start-up in the works, or an idea for one.

Take Joseph Kvedar, MD, profiled in our December 2012 issue as one of the HealthLeaders 20. Founder and director of the Center for Connected Health at Partners HealthCare in Boston, no sooner did that honor fall on his shoulders than he launched his start-up, Wellocracy. It's a side project while he continues as director of the Partners Healthcare nexus for all things connected health.

"For some time, I've felt like our ability to really get connected health adopted has been limited by our view of it through the lens of patient care," Kvedar told me at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show. "I had really thought with great interest about a way to reach consumers, so that was always in my head. And then another observation over the years was that patients, although we sometimes had to coax them to participate in telemonitoring programs, once they get on they didn't want to come off. Patients find it very comforting. They've connected in. They feel cared for."

Since October 2012, the Center for Connected Health has provided connectivity between patients' home monitoring devices and Partners' electronic health record. Patients can now view their home monitoring data in Partners' patient portal. To my knowledge, this is a first in U.S. healthcare.

"Now we're getting to the point where we can sense, collect, monitor almost anything about you, and lots and lots of people are doing it. So if I want to get in the business of tracking my own activity, I pity the person who doesn't have a guide to help them," Kvedar says.

So was born Wellocracy, a combination of self-help book and social media-driven online support group that Kvedar formed with the help of self-help author Carol Coleman. There's also an activity tracker, the Pebble, although the Wellocracy idea plays well with many of the other activity trackers out there.

"[Carol] and I conceived of this project a little over a year ago, and said, Wouldn't it be great if we could get activity tracking and health tracking out of the 'quantified selfers' and into the land of everyday folks," Kvedar says.

The key, he says, is to include tools designed to help people understand their own motivational psychology, matching their activity tracking to an app or a service they can get now. For some, that motivation will be a data-driven service such as EarndIt. For others, it will be a social connection, such as forming their own Facebook group, thereby involving their Facebook friends in coaching them to be more active.

"You don't have to turn your life upside down to use tracking to be more healthy," Kvedar says. "You use the time you already have more wisely, whether it's parking your car further away from the mall, or taking the stairs, or taking a conference call walking around your office. They're all ways that you can be more active if you just think about it, and the beauty of the tracking ... is it will give you that continuous feedback while you're doing it."

The first Wellocracy ebook, Move to a Great Body, published last December, will be followed by ebooks on sleep and diet, hypertension, and possibly one on genetics, Kvedar says.

All this prompted me to ask him at what point payers will offer substantial rewards (i.e., lower premiums) to those who prove they are taking better care of themselves through programs such as Wellocracy.

"I think that's a great question," Kvedar says. "I'm going to switch gears and use a different example in my portfolio of examples, and that's Healthrageous. That's a company that we spun out of our Center a couple years ago. All these approaches have the same things in common: the feedback loops, and the social stickiness factor and so forth, but they're bringing that product line to health plans and employers. They have one particular relationship that speaks exactly to your point, which is a relationship with a large payer in California. The people that are enrolled in that particular insurance product, in order to maintain a low premium, must be on the Healthrageous platform, and demonstrate that they're healthy."

So how does all this affect Kvedar's day job at Partners?

"It's a passion that I have, so you tend to do things and not think a lot about them when you really believe," he says. "I really believe that if we got more people tracking, we'd be a healthier society, and I want to test that hypothesis. With the advent of new payment models and the consolidation between the payer industry and the provider industry, providers will start to take on more wellness programs, and if they do, then we will have a firsthand, well-above-the-curve, knowledge base of how consumers adopt this stuff, based on this project."

How will a world of sensors will tackle the daunting problem of mental health?

"There's probably 20 companies out there building various sensors that can detect levels of emotion, and it's really the early, early, early days," he says. "It's like the body tracking sensors were 15 years ago." He points to biofeedback—"not a new concept"—as a harbinger of what's to come.

"Whenever we at the Center have done projects to give people the freedom to make good choices, inevitably they make good choices," but they want to be connected back to their healthcare providers, Kvedar says. Whether through the clinic, the Web, the app, or the ebook, technology is the great change agent for Kvedar and other leaders of his stature.