The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 2 (Apr 2014) | Page 42

Interview with Peter Ohnemus at dacadoo
Continued from page 39

fact that there are worse health outcomes in Leeds than in London.”
“We can also create Health Scores on
the fly. We can receive complete medical histories and anonymously create a
Health Score for 10,000, or 100,000,
or millions of users… this becomes
very powerful because you can create
a departmental Health Score, or a zip
code Health Score which does not only
give you the score but it actually also
tells you where are the related issues
without mentioning any employees [or
individuals], because everything is done
anonymously.”
dacadoo has seen significant global
growth in the short time the Health
Score product has been available. The
company has a number of high-value,
high-growth markets that they are looking to target with the Health Score, not
least the possibilities for revolutionising the way in which we value health in
association with insurance.
“I think that people really see that the
Health Score [as something that]: First,
gives you a hardware, software, and
content agnostic profiling and real time
scoring system; Second, mixes this with
the fun factor of gamification: and,
Third, which is very significant, we
are working with some of the world’s
leading insurance companies as they
start integrating the Health Score into
their overall pricing, so if your Health
Score improves over time you will actually have a lower health insurance premium”.
This proposition has very significant
possibilities for the future ways in
which insurance policies are valued.
We have already seen ‘driver behaviour
models’ incorporated into motoring
insurance policies, whereby the insurance provider can analyse the manner in which you drive, and then make
adjustments to your policy based upon
the results. To apply a similar
model to health insurance poli-

40

April 2014

cies, using the dacadoo Health Score as
the benchmark for analysing health and
well-being is fairly ground-breaking.
Peter believes that this will be the way
we can expect to value health insurance in the not so distant future, “In
the future I believe if someone is living
healthy and moving around then they
will actually get a better price for their
insurance.”
Discussing the company’s wider business model, it becomes apparent that
the Health Score has the potential to
be disruptive across a significant number of large markets. Peter describes
how in a relatively short period of time
dacadoo has already made a substantial
impression on many of these target
industries.
“We see very strong interest from large
employers. That is definitely our core
market. All large companies must check
the health of their employees once a
year, maybe they buy them a fitness
program or something similar, but with
dacadoo you actually see the health of
the employees in real time. Of course

all the data is anonymised so that the
employer cannot see that Mr. Smith has
a Health Score of 200 or 800, but you
can see the average Health Score of all
marketing employees, or the average
Health Score of all the people in the
factory, etc.”
“Our key strategy is to work with what
I would call the industry highways for
our distribution... Around our industry you have an ecosystem of 3-4 ke B