“As I tried to put my life back together,” he said, “as I tried to advocate for my son when he had his cancer, it became apparent to me that we have big holes in the health care system that we need to fill in some way and that we need to treat people as whole people. We need to make sure that they’re rehabilitated back to a life they enjoyed. And so we started building programs beyond just paying for acute care.”

His goal of moving Aetna down a more holistic road beyond just physical rehabilitation, aiming toward the 1948 definition of health defined by the World Health Organization as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity,” resulted in several initiatives. For example, gathering data on the communities in which patients lived, building programs that spanned urban farms in an effort to eliminate food deserts, and teaching yoga-mindfulness in inner city schools to help students focus on their studies.

But there’s a technological aspect to Bertolini’s approach, as well. He’s a big advocate for in-home monitoring via wearable devices. Specific data provided by wearables, he says, will allow the insurer to know what kind of help patients need once they’re back home in their own communities, so that it can better provide that help—not just to the patient, but to the community supporting that patient. The goal is “creat[ing] economic viability in the community by having people in the community supporting people in the community in their homes.”