Aetna is now marketing its population health and information technology businesses and products under a new division, called Healthagen, with the aim of expanding provider collaboration and offering patients mobile health tools.
"Aetna is propelling meaningful change in health care," Joseph Zubretsky, Aetna senior executive vice president for national businesses, said in a media release. "We have invested more than $1 billion to acquire and build a comprehensive collection of health management and health IT solutions to empower consumers and enable clinical integration and population health management."
The insurer's technology businesses include ActiveHealth Management, a provider of clinical decision support, analytics and personal health records, the "symptom-to-provider" consumer app iTriage, the health information exchange Medicity and an accountable care solutions suite.
Aetna says the new Healthagen division will also be used to launch other payer-neutral technologies, and the company's former head of strategic diversification, Charles Saunders, MD, has been named Healthagen CEO.
About U.S. 800 hospitals and 250,000 physicians exchange clinical data using Aetna's Medicity health information exchange, and about 8 million people worldwide have downloaded the iTriage app, which lets patients learn about possible causes of symptoms and connects them with providers.
Aetna's renewed marketing of its information technology suite -- set to begin in earnest in early March, with the launch of a Healthagen website -- comes as consumers are increasingly turning to the internet and mobile health technologies to manage healthcare services and finances.
Aetna is also facing a software patent lawsuit from the Denver-based tech firm HealthTrio, which alleges that ActiveHealth and Medicity both use "methods and systems" that HealthTrio has patented.