Arianna Huffington’s new Thrive Global venture, which officially launched today, has selected Doctor on Demand as its primary partner for telehealth. The partnership will include a place on Thrive Global’s curated e-commerce platform for health and wellness products as well as a place in a physical popup store that will exist in New York City from December 1 through January 15, 2017.
Announced earlier this year, Thrive Global is a new company that will attempt to address issues around health, wellness, and, especially, career burnout through three different businesses.
“My own wake-up call came in 2007, two years into building The Huffington Post, when I collapsed from exhaustion and burnout, breaking my cheekbone and waking up in a pool of blood,” Huffington wrote in a blog post officially launching the company. “After going around to various doctors, what I learned was that nothing was wrong — except everything was wrong. ‘Is this what success looks like?’ I asked myself. This was the moment when the seed of Thrive Global was planted.”
The three businesses are a corporate training and workshop business, a media platform called the Thrive Journal, and an e-commerce platform for products and services, including technology products, that support wellbeing. Doctor on Demand will be a featured service of the e-commerce business.
“Doctor On Demand is honored to be selected as the video-medicine partner for Thrive Global,” Doctor on Demand CEO Hill Ferguson said in a statement. “We’ve found another mission-driven organization that’s as committed as we are to disrupting healthcare-as-usual and putting people back in charge of their own health and well-being.”
The pop-up store, located in located in a 5,000 square-foot loft in SoHo, will offer live demos of the various products and services. Doctor on Demand physicians will be on site on Thursdays to offer blood pressure screenings and to host informal sessions about stress reduction, and Doctor on Demand psychiatrists will be on site on Tuesdays for “Coffee Talks” about holiday stress, sleep, and work-life balance.
“We are a company deeply rooted in science and dedicated to helping people go from knowing what to do to bring more well-being into their lives to actually doing it,” Huffington said in a statement. “I am so excited to include Doctor On Demand within our amazing collection of products, services and technologies we’re featuring at Thrive Global that will help people improve their well-being and productivity and lead healthier and more joyful lives.”
Doctor on Demand is not the only digital health company to be featured in Thrive Global’s store. The full line of Fitbit trackers appears there, as does the Sense sleep sensor from Hello, the uBiome Gut Explorer testing kit, the smoking cessation app Craving to Quit from Claritas Mind Sciences, the Breathometer Mint oral health sensor, the SCiO handheld food scanner from Consumer Physics, and a Withings blood pressure monitor.
Another service offering that’s being featured both online and in the pop-up is Kurbo Health, a mobile-enabled program aimed at preventing childhood obesity.
“We are thrilled to be part of the launch of Arianna Huffington’s latest venture,” Kurbo cofounder and CEO Joanna Strober said in a statement. “Together we hope to spread the word to consumers and businesses that there is an effective, low-cost solution to help the entire family eat better, and feel better.”
