The price they charge includes collection fee for sample draw, ordering physician fee (i.e. lab order approval, result review, consultation) and a Personal Health Record (where you can view and store the results, among other things). Users pay upfront for the tests and have the option to receive a receipt to submit for reimbursement from an insurance company or a health savings account.

There are several other players in this direct-to-consumer lab testing, like DirectLabs, HealthCheckUSA, MedLabUSA. The benefits of these services are tangible- lower cost (specially for the uninsured, who don’t want to pay for the visit to the doctor), convenience, speed and privacy.

But not everything is that straight-forward. Most insurance companies will not reimburse patients for tests that were not ordered by a physician, so the target market is restricted to people who are health-conscious and rich enough to pay for self-initiated disease monitoring. Jury is still out on many aspects- who approves these tests medically? Who carries the legal burden? Is it okay to let patients self-diagnose themselves? what about misinterpretation of results? IMHO, there is a market and advantage for direct-to-consumer lab testing, even if the healthcare system doesnt recognize or reimburse for it yet. Also, these services would look pretty good as applications on PHR platforms like Google Health.

They smartly target three different segments using different pricing/marketing strategies: Consumers (as GoWearFit), fitness clubs (as BodyBugg) and clinical researchers (as SenseWear). The specifications, features and services differ for each offering and a good comparison table can be found here. All that detailed health info does come at its price- their consumer product starts at $199.95 for the hardware and a $12.95/month subscription to the online personal manager tool.

The company has been around for more than a decade and has certainly come a long way. BodyBugg is used by contestants on NBC’s television show The Biggest Loser, you can find GoWearFit in Dick’s Sporting Good Stores, and there are a bunch of peer-reviewed publications and studies done using SenseWear. I’m a fan of products that let consumer manage their own health, and BodyMedia is certainly doing the right things to ride that growing trend.

Tying the mandatory monthly subscription seems like a walled-garden approach, though. Integrating with electronic records would be a fantastic growth opportunity- think of all the apps that can be built on top of such monitoring data if it were available on PHRs (like Healthvault or Google Health) and/or the outpatient Electronic Medical Record with your physician. Perhaps a more affordable pricing strategy would also help, since insurers are still a long way from paying for such devices.

October 2010 Update: It’s been a while since the original post above. A lot has changed. Externally, there are number of start-ups that compete with BodyMedia now (like Fitbit and others). Internally, seems like they’ve built up a solid management team. Apparently ‘GoWearFit’ brand has been decommissioned- they have focused the consumer offering to the parent BodyMedia brand. BodyBugg is now showing up as a trademark of 24 Hour Fitness USA, Inc. and they offer a program called Apex Fitness based on it. SenseWear is still out there.

January 2011 Update: BodyMedia just announced a deal with Sprint to enable cellular connectivity in it’s products. A smart evolutionary step on BodyMedia’s part. And of course, another evidence that wireless network operators are really serious about consumer healthcare as a vertical. Tomorrow’s devices will take anytime, anywhere connectivity as granted.

What a great startup idea. Service demand can be tapped easily since users are searching the web for highly specific keywords (almost all include the keyword “trials”, so bit of SEO and keyword advertising would direct the traffic effectively). Other sources are the rapidly growing PHR platforms like Google Health and Microsoft Healthvault- both encourage developers to write apps that provide such value-added services based on user’s health information. Supply is readily available on ClinicalTrials.gov, a government-sponsored online public registry of clinical trials in US.

TrialX.org is completely free for users (patients). They let investigators create free accounts to post their trial information directly, but charge a fee for providing access to the interested potential trial enrollee. It’s hard for trial investigators to find eligible patients who are motivated to stick around for the complete trial. TrialX solves both the problems for them.

Imagine the possibilities if this service gets integrated into CIS vendor products. A patient coming in for advanced  breast cancer treatment can be flagged right at admission and be given the option to enroll in an experimental drug trial right then, if they so choose. If nothing else, it’ll give the medical research community a much more real-time opportunity to advance the science.

September 2010 Update: Just read about another startup in the same space- MyTrus. They have little information on their website, so not much to discuss at this time.