Keas gamifies personal health with new online hub

Online health management company Keas is announcing a new personal health platform that gamifies health care, making it more fun for people to track and improve their health over time.

U.S. businesses spend more than $620 billion a year on employer-sponsored health care, and that number is expected to exceed $1 trillion in the next five years, according to The Kaiser Family Foundation and Constellation Research. Keas figures its SmartHealth Engine and Keas+ upgrades will help improve engagement, make people healthier, and reduce employer health care costs.

The platform has a mobile solution that leverages your personal health information within the Health Hub. With it, people can get access to their own aggregated data, benefits, and health recommendations. The Keas+ app delivers this service seamlessly to employees and their dependents.

The San Francisco company says that most people don’t avail themselves of all of the health promotions and cost-lowering services, either because they just don’t know about them or the delivery of the benefits is disjointed.

Josh Stevens, chief executive of Keas, said in a statement that reducing employee health costs doesn’t require the addition of more benefits or services. Instead, he said it needs improved utilization of the health programs employers already have. The new services from Keas are aimed at doing that. The Keas Health Hub registers an average of 51 percent of an eligible employee group, and it engages employees and their dependents an average of 14 times per month, he said.

Keas already serves about 2 million members across its customers, and it anticipates that the upgrades will elevate both enrollment and engagement experience. The Keas SmartHealth Engine is an intelligent rules-based recommendation engine for personalized benefits and wellbeing programs. Data from health screenings, demographics, eligibility, Keas utilization, and third-party claims trigger recommendations for lower-cost benefits such as telemedicine and generic medications, as well as health programs such as diabetes prevention and smoking cessation programs.

The engine delivers a custom program via the Keas+ interface, which is customizable based on each employer’s defined requirements, real-time user behavior, demographic data, and corporate priorities. You can access Keas+ via iOS and Android devices, as well as the Web.

The app includes social networking, health quizzes, “challenges,” “quests,” health screenings, and ACA-compliant wellness incentives to create an engaging experience centered around total health.

Fortune 500 employers using Keas include Pfizer, Safeway, Target, Land O’Lakes, JB Hunt, Salesforce.com, and Lincoln Financial. Keas was founded in 2008 by former Google Health leader Adam Bosworth. It has raised $33.4 million in institutional funding from Ignition Partners and Atlas Venture. Keas has 60 employees.