Bosses Harness Big Data to Predict Which Workers Might Get Sick - WSJ
▻http://www.wsj.com/articles/bosses-harness-big-data-to-predict-which-workers-might-get-sick-1455664940
Some firms, such as Welltok and GNS Healthcare Inc., also buy information from data brokers that lets them draw connections between consumer behavior and health needs.
Employers generally aren’t allowed to know which individuals are flagged by data mining, but the wellness firms—usually paid several dollars a month per employee—provide aggregated data on the number of employees found to be at risk for a given condition.
To determine which employees might soon get pregnant, Castlight recently launched a new product that scans insurance claims to find women who have stopped filling birth-control prescriptions, as well as women who have made fertility-related searches on Castlight’s health app.
That data is matched with the woman’s age, and if applicable, the ages of her children to compute the likelihood of an impending pregnancy, says Jonathan Rende, Castlight’s chief research and development officer. She would then start receiving emails or in-app messages with tips for choosing an obstetrician or other prenatal care. If the algorithm guessed wrong, she could opt out of receiving similar messages.