There's An App For That: Mango Health Gives Rewards For Taking Your Vitamins, Medicine Every Day

Staying true to a health or fitness regimen can be tough, but San Francisco-based Mango Health is looking to see whether an app can help with that. The seven-person startup just did a full launch of their app following a 16-week trial where they tracked whether regular notifications helped prescription drug takers keep on top of taking their medications every day. CEO Jason Oberfest, who came from a career in social gaming and networking with stints at DeNA’s Ngmoco and MySpace, said user retention in the trial beat what he saw with the mobile games he had launched in his previous career by three or four times. The trial was fairly small at just over 100 people. Now the app is fully available to everyone on iOS. (Android will come at a later point.) Mango Health takes tactics from the gaming world and applies them to one of the pharmaceutical industry’s toughest problems — prescription adherence. If people don’t stay on top of taking their medications properly, they could end up aggravating long-term health problems that could be more expensive to treat in the long run. Oberfest says this is a $300 billion-a-year problem. “It’s such a pressing issue that some U.S. physicians now refer to it as a ‘silent epidemic’ facing the U.S. healthcare system,” he said. He says that the current ways the industry tries to treat this problem involve tracking patient consumption of medication or analyzing back office data to identify people who are at risk of falling off a regimen. A mobile app, with proper notifications and information about how to avoid harmful drug and food interactions, could be a more effective way of nudging people to stay on track. Patients who take their medications properly can get rewards like discounts or gift cards for Whole Foods and Gap. Mango Health’s app gamifies the whole process with eight different levels that offer different kinds of rewards that range up to $100 gift certificates or discounts. It also keeps a journal of medications and supplements that people take. Mango Health’s revenue model has to balance many different interest groups. On the one hand, the company is working with brands to offer users rewards; it’s a practice borrowed from the social gaming world where brands would give offers to gamers if they downloaded titles or paid for virtual currency. Instead, in this model, these offers and rewards are

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