UnitedHealth Group Plans to Unveil Health Record for Members, Providers in 2019
Health insurer UnitedHealth Group will be unveiling a “fully integrated and fully portable individual health record,” CEO David Wichmann said on the on the company’s third-quarter earnings call yesterday.
Speaking to the insurer’s broader digital health strategy, Wichmann stated on the earnings call that the company’s consumer digital health platform, Rally—which is a website and mobile app—is now serving over 20 million registered users and will leveraged to help develop the health record.
“Rally is synthesizing information and engaging people to better manage their health, helping consumers save money by selecting the highest quality care providers, understanding their out-of-pocket costs up front, and in some markets even scheduling appointments for care. We will soon be releasing at scale a first-of-kind, fully integrated and fully portable individual health record that delivers personalized next-best health actions to people and their caregivers,” Wichmann said on the call.
While many more details are not yet known about the health record, Wichmann did say that by the end of 2019, the insurance giant has the goal of developing individual health records for the 50 million fully benefited members that it serves, as well as for their care providers.
He noted, “We would use the Rally chassis…to provide individuals in a way in which they can comprehend a tool, if you will, not only outlining their individual health record, but also giving them next-best action detail. That's what I mean by when I say it's deeply personalized. It's organized around them, not based upon generic criteria. It also assesses to what extent that they've been, and how they've been served by the health system broadly, and whether or not there's been any gaps in care that have been left behind.”
Giving a little bit more information about the vision UnitedHealth Group has in regard to the health record, Wichmann said, “You might imagine what that could ultimately lead to in terms of a continuing to develop a transaction flow between the physician and us and the consumer and us, as we us being the custodian to try to drive better health outcomes for people, but also ensure that the highest level of quality is adhered to.”
As of now, the platform appears to be more geared toward consumers than providers. Steven Halper, an analyst for financial services company Cantor Fitzgerald, noted in an update that “The Rally EHR should be able to tap into different EHRs that use APIs [application programming interfaces] and other interoperability standards, which are being more-widely adopted. Rally EHR should be viewed as a consumer engagement tool and not as a threat to legacy provider EHR products.”
UnitedHealth Group already has its Optum business line, a health innovation company that provides health services in an array of different ways, including through its growing data analytics capabilities.
