Aetna To Provide Apple Watch To 50,000 Employees, Subsidize Cost For Customers (macrumors.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mac Rumors: Insurance company Aetna today announced a major health initiative centered on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, which will see Aetna subsidizing the cost of the Apple Watch for both large employers and individual customers. Starting this fall during open enrollment season, Aetna will subsidize "a significant portion" of the Apple Watch cost and will offer monthly payroll deductions to cover the remaining cost. Aetna also plans to provide Apple Watches at no cost to all of its nearly 50,000 employees as part of a wellness reimbursement program to encourage them to live healthier lives. Aetna plans to develop several iOS health initiatives with "support" from Apple, debuting "deeply integrated" health apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch that will be available to all Aetna customers. According to Aetna, these apps will "simplify the healthcare process" with features like care management to guide customers through a new diagnosis or a medication, medication reminders and tools for easy refills, quick contact with doctors, integration with Apple Wallet for paying bills and checking deductibles, and tools to help Aetna members get the most out of their insurance benefits. Aetna's health-related apps will be available starting in early 2017, but the Apple Watch initiative will begin in 2016. Aetna has not detailed how much of the cost will be subsidized or which Apple Watch models will be available to subscribers.

Comments

Summary Needs Correction

[maliqua]

Insurance company Aetna today announced a major MARKETTING initiative centered on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, which will see Aetna subsidizing the cost of the Apple Watch for both large employers and individual customers.

The summary mistakenly said this was a health initiative.

Re:Summary Needs Correction

[PopeRatzo]

Companies have been doing health initiatives like this for years.

If Aetna really wanted to do a "health initiative", maybe they could start by actually paying health insurance claims instead of fucking people around. They're famous for trying to "run out the clock" on sick people,. hoping they'll die before a claim is approved.

Sounds like a smart move..

[thesupraman]

Giving your employer and/or health insurer access to your activity levels, location, etc..
After all, they have only your best interests at heart, right? I am sure Aetna has no hidden
profit based motives here..

I can only imagine that this will work out exactly like the vehicle monitoring from the vehicle
insurance industry - absolutely no issues there with data being used against the members...

Sign me up! a free/cheap gadget is worth giving away any amount of my personal information!

Data

[Dan East]

This sounds like a data capture initiative. Aetna has access to full medical records of those they insure. The Apple Watch captures enough health data continuously for them to be able to correlate a person's behavior with the amount of money it costs to cover their healthcare needs. This could be used to filter out who NOT to insure or how much more to charge a customer based on their lifestyle. It also could potentially decrease costs by helping people live healthier lives as well, but knowing insurance companies, data is more important to them than anything, and this is a tremendous source of it.

Re:Who cares if they actually help

[Anonymous Coward]

The insurance company won't *have* to honor their coverage, but it'll be far easier for them to consider doing so, if you have a fitness tracker.

That's what it's about.

Taking in premiums, but coming up with even more reasons to deny coverage on claims.

Re:Who cares if they actually help

[PopeRatzo]

I train brazillian Jui Jitsu. I wanted to wear a fitness tracker to figure out how much work I do in a session because they are very intense, the warm-ups are what most fitness places call a 'work-out'. You can wear them in the warm up however the trouble with them is they get torn off when you fight and they *can't* track the amount of work I am doing.

If you train Jui Jitsu, why do you feel the need to quantify the amount of work you're doing? It's like needing a special device to tell you how much fun you're having at a party.

If you need to quantify your martial arts workouts, you're missing the point of martial arts, no? Maybe I'm wrong and am just not hip with the kids these days, who seem to seek numerical validation for everything they do in the form of "likes" and "favs" and "retweets".

In thirty years of martial arts training, study and instruction, it has never occurred to me that knowing the number of calories I'm burning will be in any way enlightening. But then, I'm not really part of Apple's target demographic.