CONSHOHOCKEN, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--New Ocean Health Solutions (New Ocean), announced today its plan to extend its mobile-first health and well-being solution to Medicaid recipients nationwide at no cost. The solution, known as Wellness Advantage, is a platform that empowers people to live a healthy lifestyle, better manage their health and address chronic conditions. Wellness Advantage furthers New Ocean’s commitment to democratize healthcare and provides an accessible, affordable, high quality health and well-being solution to all Americans. The initiative is part of the company’s overall vision to provide revolutionary pricing for high quality wellness.
“Making high quality healthcare affordable and accessible is the backbone of New Ocean’s DNA,” said Hal Rosenbluth, New Ocean’s chairman and chief executive officer. “Our mission is to digitize health and well-being for everyone. We want to help Americans take healthcare into their own hands to help reduce the financial burden and improve their lives.”
North Dakota is the first state that will launch The Voyage app by New Ocean, a personalized, mobile self-management plan of action to better inform the choices people make to live better, sustainably healthy lives. The app, which features comprehensive content and hundreds of programs and tools, is designed to keep people healthy and help those with chronic conditions better manage their health.
“Ensuring the health and well-being of North Dakotans by providing access to high quality care is the fundamental mission of [our] program,” said Christopher Jones, Executive Director of the North Dakota Department of Human Services. “We are fortunate to work with New Ocean to bring The Voyage to Medicaid members across the state of North Dakota."
Michael Leavitt, former Secretary of Health and Human Services said, “Reaching Medicaid recipients with appropriate wellness support has proven to be challenging. New Ocean’s generous offer to make robust wellness tools available without charge to Medicaid beneficiaries is both generous and helpful.”
WellCare Health Plans, Inc., one of the nation’s largest managed care organizations, operating in 20 states and serving more than 4.4 million Medicaid & Medicare recipients, is exploring this mobile offering as it continues to expand its innovative options for serving members. New Ocean is in discussions with the State of South Dakota as well as two other managed Medicaid companies.
“New Ocean Health Solutions’ vision of providing low-cost, high quality wellness programs goes hand in hand with our mission to help our members live better, healthier lives,” said Kenneth A. Burdick, chief executive officer of WellCare.
New Ocean’s approach is based in behavioral economics and behavior change principles, and encompasses all aspects of wellbeing to help users chart individual voyages to improved health. The journey begins with input data from a private health assessment that lets users identify and set personalized goals. A complete lifestyle management suite (nutrition, fitness, stress management, sleep, depression prevention, responsible drinking and smoking cessation), accompanies a robust chronic condition management offering (diabetes, asthma, COPD, hypertension and soon-to-be-released, heart disease) to ensure a relevant program for all.
New Ocean offers its wellness platform to companies and health plans with more than 250,000 employees or members for 90 cents per-employee or member each month. For companies with less than 250,000 members, the cost is $2.00 per-employee per-month. Most wellness programs typically cost up to $8.00 for comparable content.
New Ocean is Hal Rosenbluth’s second venture aimed at democratizing healthcare. Rosenbluth, a founder of the retail health clinic industry, pioneered healthcare’s first foray into alternative care and the tenets of price transparency, convenience and broad accessibility to low-cost care. He later led Walgreens' charge into healthcare as the company’s President of Health & Wellness.
About New Ocean Health Solutions
New Ocean Health Solutions is a software design and development company that empowers companies and employers to foster a healthy culture. We deliver on the need for a broad enterprise health management platform that includes health and well-being programs people value. New Ocean’s lead customer is Independence Blue Cross.