17 Apr Onlife Health Discusses CDC Award-Winning App at BRFSS Conference
New Technology Awarded $45,000 Grand Prizefor Improving Public Health Surveillance
Brentwood, Tenn., April 15, 2019—Onlife Health, a national company with 23 years of expertise in delivering comprehensive wellness engagement solutions, recently attended a meeting hosted by the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to discuss its award-winning Healthy Behavior Challenge App, which was named the winner of CDC’s first Healthy Behavior Data Challenge (HBDC) in August 2018, receiving the challenge’s $45,000 grand prize.
The Onlife app collects data tracked by wearable devices and other mobile applications and then validates the data by asking the user to confirm the reported activity with a one-touch response.
The 2019 BRFSS Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) Close-out Meeting took place April 12. BRFSS is the nation’s premier system of health-related telephone surveys that collect state data about U.S. residents regarding their health-related risk behaviors, chronic health conditions, and use of preventive services.
Catherine Bass, Ph.D., director of informatics at Onlife Health, spoke at the BRFSS meeting. “Our Healthy Behavior Challenge App consumes the objective data and then pushes additional questions and validation grids to the individual in order to both confirm and add context to the objectively collected data,” Dr. Bass said. “By coupling survey data with validated device data, Onlife’s new app provides a more comprehensive view of a person’s health behaviors and makes analysis and identification of health behaviors more accurate and insightful. It improves public health surveillance by lowering costs, improving recall bias, reducing under/over reporting and boosting response rates. Our new app also creates the possibility of conducting large-scale automated data collection without additional expense.”
Initial testing of the Healthy Behavior Challenge App demonstrated a significant improvement in outcomes compared to traditional methods of data collection. The app collected 30 data points—everything from the amount of daily physical activity to the time it took to fall asleep—in the four required reporting categories: physical activity, sedentary behavior, sleep and nutrition.
“We’re looking forward to working with the CDC to find new ways to utilize our mobile app and enhance both the quantity and quality of data collected,” Bass said. “From monitoring progress in treating chronic conditions to improving patient medication adherence, this new methodology from Onlife Health offers enormous potentials to improve the health of our nation.”
About Onlife Health
Onlife Health brings end-to-end simplicity to population health and wellness, connecting and integrating people, technology, and benefit design through our user-friendly engagement platform to guide members to the next right thing to do in their healthcare journey. For more information, visit onlifehealth.com.