22 Jun A New Way to Well: Onlife Health Announces Launch of Innovative My Journey Platform
Consumer Website Features Personalization Engine That Creates a Customized Personal Health Journey for Each User
Brentwood, Tenn., June 19, 2018—Onlife Health, a national company with 22 years of expertise in delivering comprehensive wellness engagement solutions, today announced the launch of its My Journey platform, a consumer website specifically designed to create a unique journey to well-being for each user.
The new platform, the product of more than two years of in-house development and user testing, is the latest example of the company’s new brand identity and tagline: A New Way To Well.
“A New Way to Well articulates our company’s mission to deliver a wellness solution that offers a new dimension of personalization for users and a higher degree of customization for our clients,” said Mark McConnell, president and CEO of Onlife Health. “That commitment is evident in our new My Journey platform, which offers a customized health journey for each user and integrates people, technology and benefits to create end-to-end simplicity for population health and wellness.”
Onlife Health started the process of creating its new platform by talking to its health plan and employer clients, who combined have more than 11 million members. During development, testing that involved Onlife’s parent organization and the company’s own employee population provided feedback to refine the platform’s human-centered design.
“We wanted to understand what both members and clients were looking for in a wellness plan,” said Leigh Ann Ruggles, vice president of health and wellness solutions at Onlife Health. “Time and time again, the responses we heard came down to three basic concepts: make it personal and relevant, make it supportive and motivating for the user, and make it easy to use. We turned those insights into three principles—Personalized, Supported, Connected—to build the My Journey platform that drives participation and motivates users to become agents in their own health.”
Personalized: Make It Relevant
Personalization is at the heart of Onlife’s approach to wellness. By applying machine-learning algorithms and leveraging data from multiple sources, Onlife customizes the entire user experience—including content, images, goals, preferences, challenges, desired behaviors and recommendations—to match each individual’s unique profile. The result is My Journey, a step-by-step wellness plan that provides a series of small achievable steps, so users always know “the next right thing to do” to improve their health, whether it’s a person trying to lose weight or a Medicare Advantage member needing to close several gaps in care.
Independent research confirms that wellness programs today need to offer a more personalized approach. According to the “Harvard Business Review,” for example, almost 75 percent of participants in wellness programs say that a personalized, customized approach is an important part of a wellness program. Another study found that 37 percent of those not engaged in a wellness program stated it was because they didn’t find the program personally relevant.
“For people to engage in wellness, it must be personal,” said McConnell. “It must speak to each person’s situation, goals, interests and aspirations. It’s no use having a comprehensive wellness program with dozens of health-related activities if people don’t know or can’t find the right activity that is the most important to improving their health. With My Journey, people are presented with the next right thing to do and, as a result, are much more likely to stay engaged.”
A pilot program created by Onlife Health confirmed the power of personalization. For example, one personalized campaign achieved a 36.9 percent increase in health coaching engagement. That increased engagement can lead to a significant decrease in healthcare costs. In one Onlife study, users who participated in three wellness programs achieved a 49 percent decrease in PMPY healthcare costs compared to non-users.
Supported: Make It Motivational
The My Journey platform provides users with the opportunity to create their own personal health support group of friends, family and co-workers, who can view the user’s health action plan, reinforce behavioral changes, and provide accountability and encouragement. As a result, the journey to wellness becomes a shared experience to be celebrated and enjoyed instead of a solitary effort. Users can also connect with community health resources they might not be aware of, expanding the platform’s scope of influence and ability to address social determinants of health.
“One of the primary reasons people participate in a wellness program is their desire to be there for their families,” said Arthur Lane, vice president of marketing and product development at Onlife Health. “So it just makes sense for family and friends to get involved and be able to lend their support. People thrive and become more motivated when the receive encouragement from people they know and love.”
Empirical evidence confirms the positive impact of having a support system. According to one study, two-thirds of those who enrolled in a weight-loss program with friends kept their weight off after six months compared to only 25 percent for those who decided to go it alone. And during a one-year pilot program conducted by Onlife Health, the introduction of social interest groups generated a 600 percent increase in active users.
Connected: Make It Easy To Use
Onlife’s new platform is also built for today’s tech-savvy consumers, who demand easy access to their digital content. From a single platform, users can access Onlife’s entire wellness program, from wearable fitness trackers and apps to challenges, incentives and rewards, as well as all of the other benefits and services provided by a health plan, employer or third-party vendors.
To be ready for the booming market in wearable fitness trackers, which is expected to almost double from 2017 to 2021, the website’s Onlife Sync™ feature enables users to seamlessly and securely connect data from more than 120 popular fitness wearables. And Onlife’s mobile app, AlwaysOn™, provides users with anytime/anywhere access to their wellness program.
Initial studies conducted by Onlife Health prove the efficacy of providing multiple ways for users to engage with a wellness program on a single platform. In one case, the introduction of fitness device integration increased incremental new user engagement by 23.7 percent. Mobile device logins were four times higher than portal logins, and text messaging achieved a completion rate for three required actions that was 3.65x higher than traditional communication methods.
Big Data’s Unprecedented Opportunity
“With A New Way to Well, Onlife Health is leveraging the enormous power of the revolution in Big Data to collect, store and analyze information,” said McConnell. “Data is the foundation of building a more personalized experience for consumers. ‘Know your customer’ must become the mantra for any wellness program that wants to engage users more effectively through direct, personal and meaningful communications. Our new consumer website begins to fulfill the enormous opportunity to use data to positively influence day-to-day behavioral changes and build a wellness program that delivers a new level of engagement and results.”
About Onlife Health
Onlife Health is a data-driven health solutions company. Our wellness engagement platform empowers more than 11 million people to take an active and ongoing role in their own health by leveraging sophisticated data analytics to understand a population and engage each of its members in meaningful programs. Whether it’s a wellness offering for an employer group or a Gaps Closure program to drive Medicare Star ratings, Onlife solutions support multiple populations to help individuals better their health and improve their sponsor’s bottom line. Our platform recognizes each individual’s distinct needs and supports them on their own unique healthcare journey via a personalized, seamless user experience that leverages their support ecosystem. For more information, visit onlifehealth.com.