Aetna Discontinues "CarePass" Which Is Bad News For Apple

According to Venture Beat News, Aetna “would discontinue its CarePass consumer health data platform by the end of 2014,”. This news could be alarming for the many companies designing and building similar platforms in the marketplace. For those who are not familiar, “CarePass is not an app; it’s a place in the cloud with a number of application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect and receive data from a variety of health wearables and apps.” Peter Mueller, an analyst for Forrester, believes the main reason CarePass never took off is because it failed to catch on with “Aetna members and their consumers.”

Aetna’s mission for CarePass was to help their members become healthier, which is turn would lead to less health care services. This failed because “it wasn’t built to integrate with the electronic health records.” Dr. Samir Damani, a cardiologist at MDRevolution, believes that collecting health and activity data only becomes actionable when “you inject personalized feedback to make the data relevant.” In summary, Aetna’s CarePass platform did not have the amount of functionality necessary to add significant value to customers. It will be interesting to see which organization(s) can bring the complete solution to market.

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