Former Aetna president launches company selling a virtual assistant with health care smarts

By John George  – Senior Reporter, Philadelphia Business Journal

Mar 14, 2019, 4:43pm EDT

Former U.S. Healthcare and Aetna President Mike Cardillo has launched a new company, which is marketing a virtual assistant that knows health care.

HandsFree Health of Wayne is a medical technology company that created the WellBe — a voice controlled virtual assistant designed for consumers to personally manage their health at home.

The WellBe virtual assistant features voice recognition technology used to connect all family members at any time with health care experts and health care decision-makers. The device also allows people to easily track their health habits, such as whether they took their medication.

Among WellBe's specific functions are offering medication and appointment notifications, medical cost estimates, and answers to health and insurance questions. The device also contains an alert feature to aid seniors and the disabled in the event of an emergency.

Cardillo, the co-founder and president of HandsFree Health, said the company was created to develop technology to make it easier for consumers to integrate health care into their daily lives. "We want to empower the consumers to be smarter as they take more responsibility for their health care," he said, in an interview with the Business Journal.

Cardillo most recently was CEO of Health Advocate in Plymouth Meeting. Health Advocate, which helped employees navigate the complex world of health insurance and medical delivery, was acquired by West Corp. for $265 million in 2014.

"After Health Advocate I became very interested in voice recognition," Cardillo said. "I saw what was happening in the marketplace with virtual assistants and I thought it be interesting to see how it would work in the health care space, if we could take a device like Alexa and make it dedicated to health care."

A study conducted by Juniper Research projects 275 million voice-activated devices will be in use by people in their homes by 2023.

For the past two years, the 11-member team at Hands Free Health worked on developing its proprietary technology that is compliant with federal regulations. What they came up with is a device that he said is priced competitively with other virtual assistants now on the market. The company is selling two versions of the WellBe, a direct-to-consumer model and a commercial model for health plans, employers and third party administrators.

Cardillo co-founded HandsFree Health with Dan Messina. Messina was previously CEO of Magellan Health and CFO of Aetna Health. He was also a partner at Health Advocate.

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