Dive Temporary:
- Highmark Well being is teaming up with preventive well being firm Noom to supply weight administration help to members for gratis subsequent 12 months, the businesses introduced Monday on the HLTH 2025 convention in Las Vegas.
- Highmark expects almost 2 million of its 7 million members throughout Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware and New York to be eligible for Noom’s applications, which cowl weight reduction, weight administration, diabetes prevention and diabetes administration.
- The partnership is meant to deal with rising prices related to serving chubby and overweight sufferers — on which the U.S. healthcare system spends about $173 billion yearly — partly as a result of they’re extra prone to be in danger for different expensive circumstances, together with hypertension, sort 2 diabetes and coronary coronary heart illness.
Dive Perception:
The partnership with Noom goals to chop prices by treating weight administration as preventative healthcare, in accordance with Maria Baker, vp of well being technique and supply at Highmark Well being.
“Sure, we need to take value out of the system by serving to to scale back the price of members who’re already sick. However that is about avoiding value too,” Baker mentioned. Research have proven that weight lack of simply 5% to 10% can cut back the financial affect of comorbidities, in accordance with Highmark.
Nonetheless, Baker expects this system’s ROI to be “for much longer time period” than something Highmark, which operates an insurance coverage enterprise and a 14-hospital community, has beforehand invested in.
“However that’s intentional,” Baker mentioned. “We consider we have to shift the dialog … away from, ‘How can we take sick folks and make caring for them cheaper,’ to ‘How can we cease folks from getting sicker?’”
The companies are designed to assist members enhance their relationship with meals and perceive behaviors. Noom leverages instruments that use synthetic intelligence — together with good meals logging, physique scan expertise and automatic progress monitoring — to supply customers real-time insights into their weight reduction program.
In the meantime, the diabetes prevention program makes use of a curriculum authorized by the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention to coach members about diabetes danger components, whereas the diabetes way of life program helps customers with meals logging and drugs monitoring.
The digital well being platform plans to roll out extra partnerships with well being plans subsequent 12 months, Cody Truthful, chief working officer at Noom, informed Healthcare Dive.
Noom’s GLP-1 choices can even be obtainable to all Highmark Well being members who report that they are at the moment taking GLP-1s.
