Amit Ben-Haim Discusses Cloudtag’s Proposition for Healthcare and Insurance with Yuval Lange

19th October 2017

Amit Ben-Haim: What is Cloudtag’s proposition for the healthcare sector?

There are various use-cases in the healthcare service where we believe we can add value, both to the patients and to the health clinicians. For now, we are focusing on two key use-cases:

– Secondary care Pre/post-surgery telemedicine
Many surgeries have been shown to have different success chances based on patient lifestyle in the days and weeks before and after the procedure. These commonly include activity level, diet, cardio-vascular effort and weight management. The Onitor eco-system provides clinicians with an easy way of ‘prescribing’ and monitoring these behaviours to increase successful outcomes from the clinical procedure.

– Primary care pre-diabetic intervention
GP’s and other primary care providers often face patients with pre-clinical conditions and risk-factors that require an intervention but not necessarily a procedure/surgery/medication. These interventions can prevent deterioration in the patient’s condition into a chronic one which then becomes harder and more expensive to treat / manage. The Onitor eco-system provides such an preventive intervention

Amit Ben-Haim: What is Cloudtag’s proposition for the insurance sector?

Life insurance providers are finding it more and more challenging to deal with the increased health risk of NCD (non-communicable chronic diseases) without increasing premiums in a competitive market. The old model of pre-screening, risk-premium and annual renewals does not provide the level of engagement that is needed. There are specific use-cases that we are targeting:

– Early intervention
People’s risk factors change and insurers want to know about it as soon as possible. The ability to monitor key behaviours and health indicators on a regular basis directly from the members’ body means that insurers get an opportunity to intervene early before clinical conditions materialise and claims cost start ramping up. Examples are: activity levels, weight change, heart rate issues and even sleep patterns.

– Incentivising and monitoring healthy lifestyle
We have seen a lot of activity from insurers, sometimes alongside employers, to try and incentivise healthy lifestyle using wearables and digital programmes to achieve win-win scenarios. However, we are still in an initial phase where the benefits are presumed vs proven and insurers are still more focused on acquisition and engagement than on reduction in health risk / claims. Cloudtag are developing digital programmes for this market, focusing on weight-management as a key Diabetes Type II risk factor. We hope to be able to provide the protection providers with a scientifically proven tool that they could deploy to their members and realise health and financial benefits in the short, medium and long term.

Amit Ben-Haim: What is the importance of Clinical Studies in Cloudtag’s strategy?

A main differentiator for Cloudtag vs other – more lifestyle focused technology companies, is our scientific rigour and the emphasize we put on accuracy and efficacy of our solutions. Accurate collection of data has been discussed for a long time in the wearable market and many companies have taken the approach of ‘good enough for recreational use’. We believe that a higher level of data accuracy is needed or otherwise you fall into the trap of ‘garbage in – garbage out’ when you look to provide diagnostics and insights. Specifically in the weight-management area, our B2B partners are interested in the efficacy of our solution, ie delivering user engagement and sustainable weight-loss for patients that require it.

One area that we are increasingly focusing on is Behaviour Change Techniques (BCT’s) that we use in our digital platform. We believe that these can make the biggest contribution to sustainable health benefits such as weight loss. We have already shown how these BCT’s work and their impact in our first single-arm clinical study and we expect to share more on this in the future.

Cloudtag are spending a lot of time and effort conducting scientific clinical studies with patients to investigate and optimise these measures of our solution. We will continue to do so in larger scale and more global settings.

This article is part of a series of interviews and you can read Amit Ben-Haim’s previous interview here.