Digital therapeutic company Hello Heart announced Tuesday that it has released a new feature on its app that allows users to follow and understand their cholesterol levels.
Hello Heart’s app, available on Google Play and the Apple App Store, focuses solely on heart health and helps people track blood pressure, pulse, medications, weight, activity and now cholesterol. It also connects to Apple Health and Google Fit for activity data. The company, based in Menlo Park, California, and founded in 2013, primarily sells to self-insured employers to offer its app as an employee benefit. Customers include several Fortune 500 companies, such as Delta Air Lines and Northwestern Mutual.
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The new feature, called My Cholesterol, allows users to put all their cholesterol readings from clinics and labs into one place. It also alerts users of when they should get tested next, gives them opportunities to schedule appointments at nearby clinics and provides them digital coaching on lifestyle changes that can improve cholesterol levels. Users can see their cholesterol trends over time, along with explanations.
With the feature, Hello Heart is the first company to offer a management model for hyperlipidemia (when a person’s blood has too many lipids or fats), claimed Maayan Cohen, co-founder and CEO.
“[There are] two main risk factors for cardiovascular disease,” Cohen said. “One is blood pressure, the other is hyperlipidemia. They’re both severely under-managed because you can’t see them, you can’t feel them, so people ignore them.”
Cohen added that the Hello Heart app and the cholesterol feature are especially important for women, who are heavily under-treated for heart conditions and die of heart attacks twice as much as men. The My Cholesterol feature provides different recommendations for men and women because estrogen, a hormone found in greater quantity in women, is connected with cholesterol. When estrogen levels decline, levels of the harmful LDL cholesterol increase while levels of the beneficial HDL cholesterol decrease, according to Cleveland Clinic. This can lead to a heart attack or stroke.
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“[Women] get to the ER 38 minutes later, they don’t understand their symptoms, their clinical teams sometimes don’t understand their symptoms, and they’re just basically being ignored and then die of heart attacks, which is horrible,” Cohen said. “Especially as a female leader, that’s something I personally very much care about.”
The company has achieved results, too. Peer-reviewed clinical studies by the University of California San Francisco and the University of California, Los Angeles and Harvard found that the app was able to lower blood pressure for members who used it. A report by the Validation Institute also found that Hello Heart reduced total medical spending by 19% per user per year for employers.
Hello Heart has not done a clinical study on the cholesterol feature yet, but hopes to once it gathers more data among its users, Cohen said.
There are others in the space for managing chronic conditions, including Livongo, Omada and Lark. But Cohen said Hello Heart differs by specializing specifically on heart health rather than offering solutions for a range of health issues.
“I do think that in order to drive real engagement and real outcomes, you need to specialize … If you expand too broadly, you sometimes become a master of none,” she said.
Photo: Magicmine, Getty Images
