Hireup x Perx
Hireup has recently partnered with Perx Health, an app that encourages people to develop better health habits. We caught up with clinical program manager, Deena Metz, to learn more about how Perx is working with people with disabilities to achieve better health outcomes.
How does Perx work?
Perx is a phone app with the goal of helping many thousands of Australians form lifelong healthy habits. We do that through behavioural science by encouraging people to stay motivated to complete health tasks. Health tasks may include completing therapy, attending appointments, staying active, taking medication or losing weight. We do this through positive motivators and rewards, including gift vouchers. Essentially, it's a to-do list of health tasks - to-do lists aren't very novel - but the key is the behavioural science that gets people coming back into the app 5 or 6 times a day.
That’s a lot!
It’s on par with social media platforms, but this is people engaging with their health and forming healthy habits that stick.
How do you keep people motivated to stay on track?
One of our pertinent goals is encouraging someone to take their medication each day. Someone might have 4 or 5 different types of medication, so we encourage people to manage them with Perx. While in the app, they can complete a task by taking a photo of their medication pills in their hand. Other tasks that we motivate participants to complete include logging measurements, daily activity goals such as steps, therapy tasks and attending medical appointments. Once they complete a task they will get an opportunity to play an in-app game and have the chance to win a reward. There’s a host of techniques and motivators to get people to come back in and engage with their health. Essentially, we want people to build their health schedule, and then leave it to us.
Who is Perx for?
We’re not disability specific, we’re for everyone. For example, parents will use our app as a way to engage their child in their health tasks. In-app games are a nice way to put a positive spin on those mundane tasks when you’re young. We see a lot of carers using it to help manage whoever they’re working with, and we see a lot of high functioning adults with disability managing their own health, by using our app to build accountability, independence and routine into their life. We offer the ability for that individual to share their journey with their care team, support workers, loved ones or even their GP.
All of our services are fully covered under low cost assistance technology in consumables under core support NDIS funding. At this stage, we’re only available for plan and self managed NDIS participants.
Tell us about the Perx x Hireup partnership...
Perx teamed up with Hireup because we both have the same goal: provide a service for people that need it. Teaming up with Hireup allows us to reach more people who will benefit from Perx’s app and vice versa. At the end of the day, it's about putting power in the hands of an individual to really take control of their health, receive real rewards when you do and feel good about doing it.
Meet Hireup client, Debbie:
“I’ve been using HIreup for support with transport and help attending appointments and courses, domestic assistance, accessing the community, cooking and essentials shopping.
“I joined in the Hireup/Perx zoom session and got all my questions answered. I plan to use Perx to keep track of taking my medications, keep track of my medical appointments and keep track of my at-home therapy programs. To-do lists and incentives like Perx seem to have the best chance of success with and for me.”
