Digital chronic disease management company Omada Health announced today the launch of new programs designed to support individuals with Type 2 diabetes and hypertension.
Accompanying these are a set of new features for the enterprise and health plan platform focused on medication adherence and remote monitoring, all of which comprise what a representative from the company described as “the largest product expansion in Omada’s history.”
The addition of the diabetes and hypertension programs come as a part of Omada’s aim to become a more holistic health management and coaching offering, CEO Sean Duffy told MobiHealthNews. He stressed that the Omada platform is designed to be an open-ended system that customizes itself based on the user’s specific health needs.
“The reality is that obesity-related diseases tend to overlap in high concentration, so you see people with Type 2 and hypertension [or] hypertension and prediabetes, and you really have to be artful about how you reconcile that clinical overlap,” Duffy said. “Some others out in the world [have addressed this] either through acquisition or just launching separate offerings based on this, and Omada’s approach is to create the modularity and personalization in the program required to grapple with the comorbidity. So, if you come in to participate in Omada and you’re in the Type 2 stage and your managing with oral medications and you also have hypertension, we can tune the intervention for you and really customize it. It’s really building a program specific to a person versus trying to get a person to try to sign up to a program.”
Specifically, the digital program adapts its management recommendations based on variables including user demographics, indicated morbidities and comorbidities, self-identified barriers, and actions recorded over the course of a program. With today’s announcement, Omada has also incorporated data collected through the platform’s newly announced blood pressure cuff and connected glucometer integrations as well as medication adherence information to its personalization process.
"Omada delivers evidence-based behavior change by combining digitally-enabled coaching and clinical fidelity with sophisticated data science," Omada’s VP of Medical Affairs Dr. Carolyn Bradner Jasik said in a statement. "We will now bring that expertise to the challenging areas of medication adherence and remote monitoring through an extensible, flexible platform that treats the whole person — not just a single piece of their diagnosis."
Along with receiving full recognition as a Diabetes Prevention Program from the CDC just a few weeks ago, the company earlier this year announced the launch of the largest clinical trial to-date of a digital Diabetes Prevention Program. While today’s announcement is the latest in Omada’s ongoing efforts to flesh out its digital therapeutic platform, Duffy said that he doesn’t see the company expanding too far beyond its obesity-related chronic disease niche.
“[Moving forward, we’ll likely be] doubling down in obesity-related chronic disease, and just continue to put more and more R&D there to ensure that we are the best entity out there to help our customers manage populations holistically, through a single provider,” Duffy said. “Down the road, who knows — a lot of these capabilities allow even more modularity should we want to get to conditions that are totally different. That’s probably something that’s an active conversation inside the company, but, frankly, in a world where obesity-related chronic is killing more people than infections in global history, we feel like this is our sweet spot and our challenge to go up against.”
