Vibrent Health - the Catalyst for Mobile Healthcare

<p>We use our smartphones to communicate, shop, navigate, watch videos, take pictures, share our lives on social media, track our exercise, and listen to music and podcasts. So why shouldn’t they also be the main interface to our healthcare experiences? That’s the question P.J. Jain started out with in 2010 when he left behind a career in networking and telecommunications to start a company dedicated to mobile health. Called Vibrent Health, the company went on to win a game-changing contract in 2015 to help the National Institutes of Health build a mobile data-gathering infrastructure for a giant research program called All of Us.</p><p>That’s a 10-year project designed to gather medical data from more than a million people around the United States to help doctors make more customized health recommendations based on a patient’s environment, lifestyle, family history, and genetic makeup. If you’re going to try to recruit a million people into your research study and keep tabs on their health, and if those people are going to be from diverse backgrounds, and if they’re going to be distributed around the country, then there’s only one practical way to reach them, and that’s on their smartphones. NIH asked Vibrent to build a mobile app and an online portal that would become the communications backbone and the central data gathering repository for the whole project. And now that NIH is six or seven years into the All of Us project, it’s clear that in some ways the project, and Vibrent's front end, have leapfrogged over the rest of the US healthcare ecosystem. </p><p>The app provides an easy way to gather and manage data from patients in the study, and to monitor and interact with them, while still protecting their privacy.  As Jain puts it, it meets All of Us participants "where they are" – meaning, on their phones. Technology like that <i>still</i> isn’t part of the offering at most big health plans or hospital networks. But Vibrent is working to change that by partnering with health systems, academic health centers,