Health Butler: Your Personal Health Assistant
Health Butler is a privately held company, founded by physicians, including SDCMS members Danielle Reicher, MD, Murray Reicher, MD, and their UCSD medical student son, Joshua Reicher. Health Butler has emerged at a time when there is a growing consensus that self-empowered preventive health is the key to both wellness and the control of healthcare costs.
We are all familiar with the old adage, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” but when it comes to our health, most Americans do a poor job of taking care of themselves. Increasingly, individuals, employers, and government agencies are recognizing the need for consumer-driven preventive healthcare.
Preventive healthcare can be divided into three main categories: healthy habits, immunizations, and medical screening procedures. However, according to Dr. Danielle Reicher, co-founder San Diego-based Health Butler, LLC, we all suffer from generally low compliance with even the most widely understood health prevention measures. Examples include our high national obesity rate, exceeding 35 percent in some states, our low mammography compliance rates, now less than 60 percent, and our low colonoscopy compliance rates, now less than 45 percent.
Dr. Reicher co-founded Health Butler to provide individuals and healthcare providers with updated and credentialed preventive healthcare information. The Health Butler website — www.healthbutler.com — not only provides easily understood information, but also lets users confidentially and quickly view a list of their required medical screening procedures, track their preventive health compliance, and track their key healthy habits. To provide further motivation, Health Butler periodically emails each user a reminder, health scorecard, and health challenge, as well as a health-related blog. Any individual can track his or her compliance score and any sponsor (such as an employer or healthcare provider) can easily view the aggregate performance of their affiliated group (for groups of 15 or larger). For individuals, it’s a great tool for self-empowerment, and for employers, it’s a great way to understand their employee’s health and prevention status (as a group) without violating any personal confidentiality.
Health Butler aims to provide San Diegans the health literacy and motivation they need to take better care of themselves and to receive better care from their doctors. The Health Butler site contains no advertising, and all recommendations are referenced. The content is all written by physicians. In fact, Health Butler now appears on the SDCMS website as a link, having been adopted by the SDCMS as its web-resource for preventive healthcare.