Dive Brief:

• Employee wellness and healthcare have created much buzz in the past few years. These days, employers and insurers are collaborating by using data analytics to predict individual health needs and recommend treatments, according to an article at Nasdaq.
• Third party firms are offering ways to crunch data, helping employers identify which workers may be at risk for chronic, and often expensive, diseases, such as diabetes. However, employers may create privacy issues, even if inadvertently, when looking for ways to improve health outcomes.
• The basic concept is to target group health members (workers and family members) with personalized messages and other information that would both make them smarter healthcare consumers.

Dive Insight:

If an employer uses a firm like Welltok or Castlight Health, it authorizes the firm to collect information from insurers and other health companies that work with the client company. Employees can give permission to send the wellness company their health and wellness information or opt out. Employers typically do not have access to which employees are singled out by data mining. Instead, wellness firms collect aggregated data on the number of employees found to be at risk for a given condition.

This is new territory, but these types of solutions based on actionable data will no doubt continue to grow – as long as privacy issues are treated responsibly as dictated by the law.