This week in our spotlight series on innovators, we interviewed Mikki Nasch, CEO of AchieveMint.
Nasch has more than 20 years experience in technology startups and growth, and a particular expertise in mobile health. She leads AchieveMint, a platform to encourage and support healthy activity and behavior. AchieveMint also aggregates data to drive recommendations for new applications and activities that are helping users get and stay healthier. The more data you log, the more you will learn. Our interview with Nasch is below.
CTH Blog:
First, please tell us a little about yourself and why you became interested in health and technology.
Nasch:
For most of my career I’ve worked with technology companies and I’ve seen amazing improvements technology can bring. As a nation, we are getting more and more unhealthy. AchieveMint is a way to harness the power of technology to help people get healthier in a positive way; we have mastered influence in marketing to get people to buy what we would like them to buy, focusing all of those smarts on the healthcare challenge will move the needle.
CTH Blog:
Being an entrepreneur must be very rewarding and exciting, but also quite challenging. What is the passion that drives you?
Nasch:
Our nation is on a health decline. Obesity, disease and chronic pain are all on the rise. This makes our mission so important — being able to focus all of our experience in the marketing world to solve a meaningful problem really fulfills me. We have proved that this positive support toward health goals helps people achieve them faster and stay committed. That’s what drives me.
CTH Blog:
How did you get into your current field? How long have you been working for this company?
Nasch:
I’ve been working in high technology startups for much of my career. I wanted the opportunity to use technology to help people get healthier. In 2008 I began working in health with Diabetes, and learned that, with a little help, we could massively improve people’s quality of life, and we began designing the system that would be able to facilitate that. It all goes back to the AchieveMint mission of rewarding people for getting healthier. You can check out our website at http://www.achievemint.com.
CTH Blog:
What do you think is the most exciting innovation or trend happening in health care right now?
Nasch:
We are at the beginning of what promises to be a disruption in healthcare. Consumers are just getting the opportunity to learn from their own health data, and I see that expanding. Consumers are also being given the opportunity to engage in their health for financial benefits from insurers, giving them more reason to care.
What an empowered consumer could mean to the industry as a whole will be defined over the next few years, but it will not be business as usual. What we are doing is crowdsourcing the data to drive recommendations; AchieveMint users get recommendations about what else they could be doing to improve their health. This is a microcosm of what will be happening across the board in the coming years on a massive scale.
It’s individualized and data driven. That’s exciting.
CTH Blog:
Describe your vision of the future of health or health care.
Nasch:
I see a future where individuals have evidenced-based data to help them be healthier; where the consumer understands his or her responsibility in improving outcomes, and where the whole community joins in the common goal of improved outcomes.
CTH Blog:
At Kaiser Permanente, we think of “total health” as a combination of mind, body and spirit. What does total health mean to you?
Nasch:
We agree that it’s a combination of mind, body and spirit, but you also have to add social. How the combination works is nuanced for every individual, and changes much like the seasons – services need to be attuned to understanding the nuance, and be able to adjust.
Please note that Kaiser Permanente does not endorse the organizations or products featured in these discussions.
