I like software and smart analytics but all these data mining sites trying to get consumers to use and enter data with a dual purpose of defining better health are getting to be a bit much. You know can we look at the real world here and how consumers think?
I try to get people involved in their health care and they get mad at me at times, it’s the frustration and I do have
to realize that when I am in “internet” land it’s not the same as the “real” world, as to quote Mike Osinski from a video, “you can do anything with software” but it doesn’t’ work in the real world with people all the time. He’s the one that admitted he wrote the software that “built the bomb that blew up Wall Street” to quote an old New York Magazine article from 2009. He had no idea as to how his software would be used and abused. Here’s a couple of quotes from that article and today data mining makes billions in profits and has become an epidemic and stalls job creation with everyone taking an easy road that nobody regulates.
“I never would have thought, in my most extreme paranoid fantasies, that my software, and the others like it, would have enabled Wall Street to decimate the investments of everyone in my family. Not even the most jaded observer saw that coming. I can’t deny that it allowed a privileged few to exploit the unsuspecting many. But catastrophe, depression, busted banks, forced auctions of entire tracts of houses? The fact that my software, over which I would labor for a decade, facilitated these events is numbing. Is capitalism inherently corrupt?”
“Mike,” he told me when denying my request, “can you really look for people dumber than you and then take advantage of them? That’s what trading is all about.”
Have you ever spoken to the general consumer and tried to help them with some of the information out there, I do. Believe me they do not enjoy entering data and are more and more becoming aware of all the data mining and selling even with lacking the specifics. Myself I don’t enjoy entering data on websites either for more than I have to. Let’s look back to this article that I wrote a couple years back for a taste of reality…
What’s On the Agenda Tonight–World of Warcraft or Work on My Personal Health Record
One should acquaint themselves with the Terms of Use page first if you have time as assume this is why they put it out there, that’s enough 
to make you think you have stumbled on to something that is like “gold” (grin). Just the license to use the site is enough to scare off folks as it contains the usual legal mumbo jumbo of complexities. We all know about the data mining and selling business and United has been king here for years with their Ingenix division now called Optum and they started with selling your prescription data and it continues on today.
So again…let’s get to the real world here and is this exciting…probably not to the average consumer and these win-wins are just one more way to potentially collect more data for sale, it’s an epidemic in the US and should be licensed and taxed. When you get down to it, the people and companies that write this software don’t use it themselves and
we get back to “its for those guys over there” again. Commit yourselves as companies to all the technologies you want but there’s not true value in every software program, portal etc. that is created. BD
UnitedHealthcare and Novu are launching an innovative online portal, www.uhc.novu.com, that enables people enrolled in UnitedHealthcare Medicare Advantage and Prescription Drug plans to create their own health-improvement and wellness programs.
“We believe this easy-to-use online program will empower people to take a more active role in their daily health routines by enabling them to tailor personal wellness programs based on their own unique health needs,” said Tom Wicka, president of Novu. “We partnered with UnitedHealthcare to create this platform because both companies share a commitment to developing innovative technologies that help people improve their health and wellness.”
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/unitedhealthcare-novu-launch-online-portal-133000479.html
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