Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Abshire, Senior VP of Products, Marketing and Member Engagement, Virgin HealthMiles (Part 5)

SM: Very good. Is there anything else that you’d like to add?

TA: Yes. We have a new set of capabilities coming out in our spring ’12 release. What we’re doing there, and where we’re trying to go with that is focusing a lot more on personalization and segmentation, so, helping employers look more precisely at the different groups in their populations. And then there [will be] better tools in terms of programs that are offered, the way the incentives are designed, the way the game effects are designed, they all can be done in a much more personalized manner. We’re trying to move beyond see a population as a whole.

SM: Personalization is a topic of huge interest for me and this audience. We believe that personalization is one of the big open problems for this decade, for the Internet in general. Have identified clusters that you’re going to personalize based on the basis of, for example a diabetes cluster? Are you going to do a cancer cluster? What kinds of clusters are you planning to focus on?

TA: We focus a lot today on behavioral clusters, people who are active or eating well might get a different series of programs or structure from people who are inactive or battling weight gain or those kinds of things. We’ve improved some of our data collection tools, so now you can use things like health risk assessments to target other kinds of behaviors or situations. A lot of employers have us and utilize that information combined with the biometric information. As you can tell, we’re big into data. We like to get ongoing tracking data through biometrics. The combination of mobile plus personal quantification is a real interesting area for us. How can you put inexpensive, easy to use devices that can leverage the cloud to deliver information about blood pressure, weight and those kinds of basic tracking factors at an affordable price presents a big opportunity out there.

We use that information to identify areas of interest, guided by our clients and what they’re trying to achieve by their health and wellness strategies. Then we try to use that data to personalize. We look at people’s levels of engagement. Are they engaged with our communications either through the website or through email or messaging? What’s their preferred form of communication? What kinds of campaigns do they respond to? Then we use gain mechanics in other ways, to gain an understanding of degree of participation. We try to use those elements to … if we see them falling behind their normal pace, in terms of, say, engaging the website, we try to bring them back, if they’re lapsing in their use. We try to use the data that we collect to personalize the experience and the information that those folks receive based on things such as their own individual habits.

Certainly, one of the big topics in technology that we hear about kind of falls under the moniker of big data and that’s a fascinating area in which we see big opportunities. The data that we can collect through Web interaction and mobile interaction … there’s a tremendous amount of data on individual behaviors. The tools are still pretty rudimentary in terms of being able to turn that data into something that’s actionable. We’re definitely interested in areas where entrepreneurs can come in and help and take it from being a data problem to … something defined and trigger behaviors around specific individuals. That’s definitely an area that we’re interested in.

SM: Are you going to open up your platform for development?

TA: We opened the platform for what we call program integration. As a development platform, we haven’t taken that step yet. We’re still doing some additional work in terms of architecture and APIs. In terms of serving our clients, either through consoles or APIs, yes, we want to allow third-party program providers such as people who deliver smoking cessation programs and weight loss programs to use our game mechanics, our communication tools and to have access to our reporting data. Those are all areas that we’re focused on developing. Again, we want to be that engagement platform, that tool that helps to motivate, measure and manage across the whole health and wellness strategy, and not just focusing on our program but really making it more of an open platform that other vendors can manage as well. The degree to which they can leverage the technology will evolve over time.

SM: Very interesting, Tom. Thank you for sharing what you’re doing. It’s fascinating what you’re doing and the direction of your product. I like it a lot.

TA: Thank you, Sramana. It’s been a pleasure to meet you.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tom Abshire, Senior VP of Products, Marketing and Member Engagement, Virgin HealthMiles
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