San Francisco-based digital health startup Wildflower Health partnered with health insurance company LifeMap Assurance to launch an app, called LifeMap Due Date Plus, for expectant parents with short term disability coverage. The app is available on iOS and Android devices.
"LifeMap is an ancillary benefits provider meaning that they provide things like disability benefits, insurance benefits, and dental benefits to employers," Wildflower CEO Leah Sparks told MobiHealthNews. "And, what’s interesting about them is that — the number one reason for short term disability is typically maternity. So in the implementation we’re doing with LifeMap, it’s a little bit different than some of the other customers where we might focus on the medical intervention. It’s really about helping women navigate some of the things to do with taking time off work, tapping into their disability coverage, which is just as top of mind when women are navigating pregnancy as the healthcare piece. It’s a really nice and neat point of synergy between what we offer in Due Date Plus and what LifeMap offers."
Wildflower Health developed Due Date Plus, an app that helps pregnant women track their symptoms, monitor key milestones, read health tips, and view their benefits. One of Wildflower's key customer groups are payors, who offer the app to their members. Many important features included in the app, like the click-to-call a nurse or "view benefits" features, are already available to the payors members, but Due Date Plus helps to highlight them.
This month, Wildflower completed a year-long pilot with Wyoming Medicaid, which offered some promising results.
"One third of the users have identified at least one high risk issue using our program in Wyoming," Sparks said. "And we were able to triage the majority of those users to some type of resource in the state, whether it’s peer management, or a smoking cessation program, or a public health nurse. I think that’s validating because it’s showing that people aren't just engaging on a mobile app, they are actually using it to self-identity things going on in their pregnancy and take an action that will help make them healthier."
The pilot also showed that 60 percent of users were taking advantage of the "enterprise features", like click-to-call a nurse. Sparks explained that results from the pilot have helped the company recruit clients, one such customer is Aetna.
"We have high tech employers in the commercial segment and then these Medicaid segments, and they’ve both been equally successful. I think it sort of speaks to the sort of universal needs of pregnancy, whether you have private healthcare or public healthcare, you still need support for health issues," Sparks said.
Wildflower is set to do at least three more client launches in the next few months, including some on both the Medicaid and commercial side. The company is also actively working on a Spanish version of Due Date Plus, because one of their clients is in Texas and requires a Spanish language version. Eventually, Wildflower will also launch a separate, but connected application, which focuses on early childhood.
"Our vision was always to have maternity be a starting point, but our ultimate goal is engaging people in different phases in the family journey," Sparks said.
