MyHealth100: goodbye mental math, hello empowerment

How can you distill the very complex and nuanced nature of health into something that’s easy for clients to understand and act on? That question is what led us to develop the Active Health Index,* a metric that shows the health of individuals or a population on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being an ideal state.  It’s a fascinating, multi-dimensional algorithm that produces a simple score that makes it easy for our clients to understand the health of their population while also generating individual-level insights that help care managers address specific health opportunities for our members.  

Within the health index, there are dimensions of health that are established – like age and underlying health conditions. There are also things that vary based on how a person manages their health – factors like lifestyle risks and medication adherence. We wanted to carve out just the dimensions people control and create a new score that helps our members understand, in an easy way, what their health is and how they can change it. That was the genesis of MyHealth100. 

It’s not enough to just give a metric without helping people understand how to change it. If a member gets a health score of 80, the AI behind MyHealth100 also delivers a plan to improve it.

With MyHealth100, everyone starts at 100, but then we look at how they’re managing their health. Every time they miss an opportunity to improve their health, it takes a little away from their score. It could be a treatment they’re not taking as prescribed or a preventive screening they could benefit from.  The more gaps and risks the member has, the more the score deviates from 100. But as they tackle and resolve them, the score goes back up. Members can see their score, and ActiveHealth clinicians they’re working with can too. Everyone is on the same page and they can work together to develop a plan to get the member to their best possible health.

It’s not enough to just give a metric without helping people understand how to change it. If a member gets a health score of 80, the AI behind MyHealth100 also delivers a plan to improve it. They’ll see pathways they can take to raise the score. Before they choose to go down one path or another, they can tell how much impact each one would have. For example, the reduce the risk for diabetes path may increase the score by 10 points while managing stress might increase it by 5 or 6. The score, the pathways and the curated content within them, combine to help the member understand their health and how to improve it.

Once members start working on their health and we get new data, either from work in MyActiveHealth or from connected devices, MyHealth100 recalculates. Members can see their progress and build their confidence to continue.

The beauty of MyHealth100 is that it takes out the mental math for members. It shows a simple score and offers weighted ways to improve it. At the same time, the choice of what to address first belongs, as it should, to the member. They can start a journey with a lower weight because it addresses a health issue they feel is more urgent. They can work on a shorter goal instead of a longer one. MyHealth100 helps create a personalized, focused experience that drives toward a clear goal while preserving the member’s sense of control and building a sense of empowerment.

*FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE ACTIVE HEALTH INDEX: Watch our video on YouTube, read our article “The quest to quantify health,” read our article “Physical and social factors that affect health.”