Aetna will shut down its consumer-facing health app, CarePass, by the end of the year.
The app was designed to help users track their health and fitness by combining information into a single dashboard. "You can have a fitness profile that normalizes the data so it gets all the steps and miles and time duration," pulling the information from different apps, Aetna Vice President Martha Wofford told InformationWeek when the app launched in 2013. "And the same with nutrition: you can use multiple different apps to track your caloric intake and so on."
Aetna's decision to phase out CarePass is reflective of the struggles of mHealth developers, says Daniel Ruppar, global programming director of connected health at Frost & Sullivan. "The closure of Aetna's CarePass illustrates the struggles companies in the digital health space are experiencing and facing in developing and sustaining users, and business models to scale," he says. "Companies are still learning how to effectively engage consumer and professional users. They're also trying to determine what works in terms of scaled solutions outside of the rampant piloting which goes on for mobile and other progressive technology markets including telehealth and remote patient monitoring."
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