Jul 155 min read

Scout InsurTech Interview with ROOK

ROOK is an API for wearable and health-data integration. They seek to empower software and apps with more meaningful health metrics and recommendations through a single API integration. Michael Fiedel sat with Head of Growth, Nolan Parker, to learn more about how ROOK is impacting the industry.

What is ROOK’s client focus?

“We are focused on insurtech clients in the life and health insurance space as well as digital health.”

What does your product do?

“We are a wearable health data API, supplying the data from the wearables to power underwriting, wellness engagement programs and remote patient monitoring.”

How much capital have you raised?

“We have raised $3 million to date.”

Was the company born from within or outside the industry?

“I would say we are from outside the industry. We come from a variety of backgrounds including clinical trials, medical devices and fitness technology. Bringing our solution to market, we saw the biggest opportunity and biggest initial interest in insurance and digital health.”

What growth metrics have you accomplished over the last 12 months?

“We're actually super proud to have signed our first 30 clients, and those are across five continents. We’re seeing a diverse and broad interest and continuing to grow that potential user pool of wearable clients connected.”

Within your domain, what’s the current challenge that the industry is facing?

“The biggest issue is how fragmented the wearable market is. We've already seen this and gone through this a lot with healthcare data and electronic medical records (EMRs) - the wearable market is very similar. To be able to extract the data, process it, drive insights from it and build an experience on top of it, really slows down a lot of teams from being able to effectively utilize what’s actually a wealth of data. We've seen this with leaders in the space. They're building innovative products in the insurance landscape, and in order to get there, they either have to say, ‘Well, we're going to supply everybody with a wearable device, so we only have to do one integration.’ Or, they're limited in some way by what they can do based on the tech and the access to data.

ROOK has focused on being the infrastructure that allows companies to quickly access their users' wearable data and be device agnostic. Whether it’s using the data to improve wellness, pulling historical data from wearables for smart and accelerated underwriting or continuous risk assessment and user engagement, we have aligned incentives. We want to get people healthy and keep them healthy. How do we do that? We need to engage with them. We need to give them content and reminders to check in with their care team. Wearables create an engagement opportunity. They give you insights about the users, and we help unlock that for companies.”

How does ROOK take a unique approach to providing value?

“One of the biggest issues we've had from talking with our early customers in the space is they really need data that's clean, actionable and timely to build on top of. A lot of the integrations and the problems that people run in today is maybe they do an integration with Fitbit, but then they go to do Apple Watch. The data is in totally different formats, so they need to standardize the language that they speak in.

ROOK is dividing that data up and not only putting it into a common language, but putting it into pillars that make it easy for companies to recognize what they have to work with. We have a sleep pillar, a physical activity pillar and a body health pillar, and within those, you'll receive individual events every day. We also give daily summaries, and scoring that can be useful for insights and trends about users' health.

Using the World Health Organization standards for each of those areas, we're looking at how much sleep and deep sleep somebody is getting as well as physical activity data and their heart rate variability. We align those with standards and recommendations for a healthy person. Now, you can quickly look at your audience and get an understanding of where people land on the spectrum based on these global standards.”

What inspired the team to start this company?

“With our diverse backgrounds, we've seen in a variety of ways how data can change people's lives. This also aligns with what AI is unlocking for a lot of companies in that they can process large data sets and clean insights that were previously very hard to get or had to be very pointedly directed at. The way we approach health as humans where the nutrition and fitness worlds are merging with the healthcare world will help insurance to create programs where users actually have personalized insights. I mean that in the sense that we can now scale personalization with machines and AI in a much better way.

What we're seeing is now you can understand user behavior and recommend the best possible products to them, both in terms of maintaining and improving their health but also in terms of insuring them and making sure they're on the right programs for them that are going to best align with their needs and their potential risks.”

Can you share any goals for the next 12 months?

“We have a few pilots and a few different partners that we're working with to build models around morbidity and risk assessments. In the wild, those are in the life insurance space. We are also working toward electronic health record (EHR) integrations, and so not only having this data directly available to our clients, but actually being able to inject it into the larger health ecosystem is exciting. One of our investors is InterSystems, and we've worked with them to convert wearable data to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) compliant formatting to be injected and received by the health records. Outside of that, we’re adding additional, data-source integrations to better align with markets that we serve.

We’re aiming to get more Asian, African and European markets involved, as well as launching continuous glucose monitors. There’s a super exciting use case with Abbott and Dexcom now releasing non-medical glucose monitoring. We're going to start to see more of those used as the chronic-care crisis in our country is growing and swelling.

Finally, the last big goal is getting our first clients up and running in the clinical trial space. There’s another very cool use case and application of wearable data as the FDA is improving products from Apple and Garmin for more use cases like detection of Atrial Fibrillation (AFib). We're seeing a broader application of what a wearable can be used for that gets away from more of the traditional medical devices and can improve the accessibility to patient data.”