Whoop has never been known for marketing to an older population. Performance athletes headline ads for the wearable company, which aims to turn continuous streams of physiological data into useful insights for behavior change — mostly, for a young, fit customer base.
But this year, Whoop became one of the first consumer wearable companies to be accepted into Medicare’s ACCESS program, making it available at no cost to many traditional Medicare patients ages 65 and up. On Wednesday, at the STAT Summit in Boston, Whoop’s newly appointed chief medical officer Ami Bhatt spoke about how the company is moving to build experiences — and demonstrate outcomes — for a very different population.
“Number one on our roadmap — and I think I’m allowed to say this, if I’m not, I’m saying it — is simplification of the app,” said Bhatt, who previously chaired the Food and Drug Administration’s digital health advisory committee and served as the American College of Cardiology’s chief innovation officer. Surveys suggest, said Bhatt, that even members of the Silent Generation, who are older than 80 today, trust their clinicians with their data. “It’s not that they’re averse to giving data,” she said. “It’s how easy can we make it for that population to be able to share their data.”
Bhatt said that Whoop, which recently raised $575 million from investors including Mayo Clinic and the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar, is working with the National Council on Aging and AARP to think about how to personalize the product to older adults’ individual priorities. “For each of us, how we feel, how we perform, how we age, we have our own goals,” said Bhatt. “The thing is, we don’t want to decide for you what that is.”
The goals are less diffuse for the 10-year pilot ACCESS program, which published a directory of initial participants last month. Through those 55 companies, Medicare patients can access chronic condition management for little or no cost — Whoop serves patients with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, and prediabetes — and Medicare will pay the companies based on their health outcomes. Whoop will provide patients with a wearable, a 12-month subscription to its app, and access to clinicians who can help them make sense of their data and offer advice.
“The goal is, how do we bring technology closer to the patient, but not put the cost on the patient — rather, put the demand on the company,” said Bhatt. “Whoop takes responsibility for, in 12 months, I am going to make these people better. I’m going to show you outcomes in the Medicare population who have these risk factors to demonstrate that my technology can help them engage in their own health.” To receive full payment under the ACCESS model, Whoop will be required to show that it improved or controlled measures tied to its patients’ chronic conditions, including blood pressure, hemoglobin A1C, and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol.
Bhatt said it was her role to help the company — which until recently focused on selling a product intentionally binned in the wellness category — develop and demonstrate those kinds of outcomes that bring them closer to clinical practice. The company just this year announced the ability for users to discuss their wearable data with clinicians, shortly before the FDA closed its warning letter that had initially said Whoop’s blood pressure-estimating feature qualified as a medical device — not a wellness feature.
While Whoop demonstrates good patient engagement, said Bhatt — users check the app eight times a day, on average — research into the original “wearable” for diabetes, continuous glucose monitors, suggests that engagement doesn’t necessarily translate to better health outcomes.
“In order to actually create personalized health at a population level, you need to start thinking about outcomes,” said Bhatt. “Can we show that we decrease blood pressure by five millimeters of mercury in individuals on Whoop — which, by the way, we have shown — so that we can say, hey, the outcome of cardiovascular disease and stroke, we know that outcome is better.”
At the same time, Bhatt said, the utility of continuous data is limited within the traditional health care system. As a practicing physician, “I had some really great patients who would print out binders of their wearable data,” she said. “This is me: I love this data. And I’d be like, ‘Oh, God.’” Despite her interest and the patient’s engagement, it was impossible to handle in a 20-minute visit.
Ultimately, Bhatt imagines Whoop could help solve that problem, perhaps by delivering contextualized reports to clinicians that summarize a patient’s continuous data along with key points from their own journaling entries and interactions with their Whoop app coach. “When you put that together and you actually have a comprehensive report you can give to a clinician, now your clinician says, ‘Oh, that’s what I needed.’”
