Healthcare isn't only about treating patients any more. For people who get their insurance through an employer — more than 155 million Americans — the experience of staying healthy is spread across an employer, an insurer, a clinic and their own daily habits. Nobody owns the whole of it.

The problem, with numbers

Half of patients don't take medication as prescribed, and 20–30% never finish it. That non-adherence is linked to roughly 125,000 deaths a year and at least 23% of hospitalisations — between $100 billion and $289 billion in avoidable cost.

On the other side of the table, employers see rising healthcare costs with no visible return in employee wellbeing, too little data too late, several vendors for one health strategy, and employees who don't engage with any of it.

What the competition missed

We looked at the leaders in employer-based healthcare. They all pointed people to resources and recommended care by condition. None of them helped build a new habit, recommended a provider from a symptom, or paid attention to the everyday behaviour that is often the earliest sign of a long-term condition.

How might we…

Two goals came out of the research. First, help people stop being careless with their own health: never miss a medication or an appointment, see their history easily, and get content that actually helps. Second, make it easy to get care when something goes wrong: know the nearby partner clinics, get attended to faster, and have insurance details already in place.

Two scenarios that shaped it

Jacob feels a sharp pain in his chest in a client meeting, asks his assistant to book the nearest clinic, and arrives to a wall of insurance questions — so he pays in cash, in a hurry, frustrated. Julie, at a dental clinic she researched hard to find on her insurer's list, is asked to pay more than she expected, and can't reach her insurer until her HR replies.

The proposed solution

One app whose job is to motivate a healthy life, not just process claims. Find care with ease — a 24×7 concierge, appointments, a caregiver. Join a programme for a condition, like weight management, with steps, calories, exercise goals and gym memberships in one place. Get nudged towards good habits — water, mindfulness, quitting smoking. And for chronic conditions, pregnancy or young parenthood: reminders for medication and appointments, education, occasional risk assessments, immunisations and daycare.

*Originally published on Medium.*

Read the full piece

This note is a summary. The full essay — with the research, the sketches and the reasoning — lives on Medium at medium.com/@amitchotia9.

Physics taught me you don't get to call it right until it's proven. Most of what I write is me trying to show the working.