The big buzz word around corporate wellness solutions is complete: being not just a food journal or a workplace wellness program but a comprehensive solution that can engage someone at any time, make them healthy, increase productivity and someday cut healthcare costs.
BettrLife is inching closer toward its first customers with such a vision: combine things like healthy recipes, a calorie counter, an exercise log and more into one application. Then, share all that information over to a person’s real-world health coach who can review and provide feedback to how the user’s doing.
To the creators of BetterLife, it trumps the myriad of other wellness apps by being a software platform that combines what multiple apps do, leverages a cloud-based system, and makes it relevant enough people would keep using it.
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“You have to make it easy enough for someone who doesn’t have the technological savvy not only to use it but want to use it,”said Don Schoen, the company’s CEO who also co-founded the electronic medical records company MediNotes (which was acquired by Eclipsys for $45 million in 2008).
“Ultimately, they see this will help them give them a better lifestyle,” Schoen said.
Ideally, this is how BetterLife will work: an insurance company or self-insured businesses instituting a corporate wellness solution would roll out the BetterLife app (only BetterLife’s shopping app is free to consumers). Wellness coaches can customize nutrition goals (low-carb, gluten free, etc.) and then push healthy recipes to each of the members – complete with ingredients for the meals.
The member could then use the BetterLife app to record their purchases and the exercises they actually do. Wellness coaches can see this in real time, provide feedback and reward their members with points or other incentives.
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The company, based just outside of Des Moines, Iowa, had part of its solution bundled into Aetna’s CarePass program and is now moving to bring its entire product to market. BetterLife has raised about $2.5 million in private capital, and is hoping to raise an additional $1.5 million to $2 million in the coming months.