Walgreens Starts Steps with Balance® Rewards

Walgreens has been rather savvy when it comes to mHealth. They have a great mobile app and website to help manage prescriptions as well as find answers to health questions. It was no surprise to me when I heard about their Steps with Balance Rewards program.

If you are familiar with Walk with Walgreens, Steps with Balance® Rewards replace that program. Basically, you get rewards for doing simple exercise and health “tasks” throughout the day. By walking, running, or tracking weight management, you earn points that can be redeemed for products and other rewards at Walgreens.

There are a few popular devices that can be associated with your Steps with Balance account — BodyMedia, FitBit, and Withings. This makes it easier to earn rewards and track your progress.

I’m not sure if this is something I’ll sign up for, just because I feel like I have so many other programs I’m involved in, but it seems cool. It sounds like a good way to track your progress toward certain goals, and earn rewards while you are at it. It has the typical features of a health tracking program – you can connect with others, set personalized goals, and see your progress. It looks like it has been pretty successful so far, as there have been close to 10 million miles logged and around 600 thousand users. So if you shop at Walgreens a lot, and you are wanting to be rewarded for living a healthy life, this may be the program for you!

If you want to sign up, it’s free! Just head over here and get started today (and yes, it’s free)

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May 3, 2013 I Written By

Katie Clark is originally from Colorado and currently lives in Utah with her husband and son. She writes primarily for Smart Phone Health Care, but contributes to several Health Care Scene blogs, including EMR Thoughts, EMR and EHR, and EMR and HIPAA. She enjoys learning about Health IT and mHealth, and finding ways to improve her own health along the way.

Filed Under: Health Care  mHealth  Patient Home Monitoring  Social Networking Health
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1 Million Prescription Text Alerts Using Walgreens Prescription App

I really love when people say that mobile healthcare is never going to happen. Of course, many people really don’t mean what they’re saying. What they’re really trying to say is that there’s not a full industry for just mobile healthcare apps. Instead, they argue that mobile will play a role in healthcare, but it will likely come from existing healthcare industry players.

I think this news coming out of Walgreens is an example of that. Last week, we got word that 4 months after its launch, the Walgreens prescription refill by scan has over 1 million subscribers to the prescription text alert service.

I saw this application at the CES conference (or maybe it was from one of Walgreen’s competitors). Sweet and simple. Just like consumers want in their apps. Props to Walgreens for launching their Refill by Scan application on both the iPhone and Android app marketplaces.

Here’s a quote from Walgreen’s President of e-Commerce, Sona Chawla:

“Our customers have enthusiastically adopted our mobile applications and we’re continuing to bring innovative technology to our online and mobile platforms to enhance the customer experience,” Sona Chawla, Walgreens President of E-commerce, stated in the company release. “With refill by scan, prescription text alerts, unique photo features and the ability to shop or browse products all available on a mobile device, we’re adding new levels of choice, control and convenience for our rapidly-growing numbers of mobile customers.”

I’m still interested to see how all of these mobile health applications evolve. Are we going to end up having 20-30 apps on our smart phones? Or is there going to be a few apps that take over and do most of the heavy lifting for mobile healthcare? Either way, I can tell were at the very beginning of what will be an exciting change for smart phones in health care.

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March 7, 2011 I Written By

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 15 blogs containing almost 6000 articles with John having written over 3000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 14 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John launched two new companies: InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com, and is an advisor to docBeat. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: and and .

Filed Under: Android  Apple  Health Care  Healthcare IT  iPhone  mHealth  Mobile Health Care  Smart Phones
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