The digital health community is growing strong in Colorado

Harnessing artificial intelligence to provide individualized advice about ways to improve health, leading users to healthcare resources and helping them understand insurance benefits, are a real possibility thanks to a new mobile app, reports Forbes.

Denver-based company Welltok, founded in 2009, is a digital health company that create a mobile app called CaféWell Health Optimization. The app provides advice that is individualized to the user, gives advice about ways to improve health and helps users understand insurance benefits. The success of the app helped grow the company more than 1,800 percent, adding 189 of its 210 employees and generating more than $10 million in revenue.

Welltok is just one part of the new digital health community in Colorado called "Prime Health." The community is populated by academics, entrepreneurs, investors, technologists and healthcare providers and administrators. It has goals to provide Colorado with the best digital health ecosystem and to make Coloradans the healthiest citizens of any state.

With the support of the state, Welltok’s app is being launched as a health incentive program to state employees. With over 10,000 employees participating in activities encourages by the app, more than half of participants completed a health risk assessment using CaféWell, a 650 percent increase over the prior year.

“Building a foundation for digital health companies goes hand-in-hand with making Colorado healthier,” said Prime Health CEO Jeffrey Nathanson. “Collaboration among companies, established ones and newbies, is the key.”

Each year, Prime Health hosts the Digital Health Challenge to qualify companies and pair them with industry players. By 2014, Prime Health had qualified 70 companies, which went on to raise more than $34 million. Their technologies include the online physical therapy app Telespine, which seeks to reduce medical costs due to low back pain through employee engagement.