Payer

Since Walgreens merged with UK drugstore chain Boots last year, the company has been ramping up its digital strategy and has announced a slew of strategic partnerships with companies like Qualcomm Life, WebMD, MDLive, and PatientsLikeMe.

It's no surprise that 94 percent of consumers currently enrolled in wellness programs have heard of the Apple Watch, given how much buzz is surrounding the forthcoming wearable.

A program is coming to the United States that will allow life insurance customers to get a discount on their payments in exchange for sharing health and wellness data with their insurer.

Minneapolis-based Novu has raised $20 million from SSM Partners and Noro-Moseley Partners for its app-enabled wellness program, which it offers to payors, providers, and employers.

Misfit Flash, one of the devices that will be used in the study.

Existing UnitedHealthCare tool At the HxRefactored event in Boston last week, UnitedHealth Group Vice President of Innovation and R&D Kunjorn Chambundabongse discussed the strategy behind the payor's internal incubation group and revealed one of the group's newest projects, a vending machine that will sync up with employee wellness plans.

A new survey of 121 employers from Fidelity Investments and the National Business Group on Health shows that employer spending on incentive-based wellness programs is up an average of $100 per head over last year.

San Mateo, California-based Collective Health has raised $38 million in a round led by Founders Fund and NEA, with participation from Formation 8, Redpoint Ventures, RRE Ventures, Subtraction Capital, and Rock Health.

Corporate wellness platform Keas has launched a new product for self-insured employers, called Health Hub.

Seventy percent of health insurance companies have published only one or two apps and 67 percent of those companies have achieved less than 100,000 downloads on the apps they do have, according to a new report from Research2Guidance.