On Tuesday, July 16, Welldoc’s Chief Strategy Officer held a webinar with the Digital Therapeutic Alliance’s Megan Coder. It kicked off a series of webinars Welldoc will be hosting on the value of digital therapeutics and key lessons learned from some of the pioneers and innovators in the space. Let’s dig in with five key takeaways.
Every year, $8 billion is spent on programs promising to help people improve their health, increase workplace productivity, and reduce healthcare costs. Yet there’s growing evidence that these programs have largely failed to achieve these objectives.
Blue Shield of California (BSC), an innovative health insurer with 4.3 million members, has launched a digital therapeutics platform to phase out these programs, which Bryce Williams, Vice President, Lifestyle Medicine, calls “zombies.” The platform features a selection of about 70 digital health apps (out of more than 300,000 currently available in the Apple App Store), curated for clinical effectiveness and consumer preference.
Pharmaphorum (Richard Staines) — Germany has passed a law allowing doctors to prescribe digital apps with health benefits, which can be reimbursed by the country’s health insurance system.
The new system is made possible by the Digitalisation and Innovation Act (Digital Supply Act), drawn up in draft by federal health minister Jens Spahn and approved by the federal cabinet yesterday.
Germany is following the example of the US, which over the last few years has introduced a system where the FDA is able to approve apps that have trial evidence showing clinical benefits.
Tech Crunch (Chris Hogg) — Silicon Valley is obsessed with growth. And for digital health startups, that obsession is not only misguided, but dangerous.
The prevailing idea in the tech industry is that to succeed, you have to be ready to sell your idea, no matter how far along your idea really is. You’re encouraged to believe in your product even when there is no product to believe in.
And if you’re disrupting the mattress industry or the eyewear sector, maybe that’s okay.
But digital health startups must be held to a different and higher standard. We touch people’s lives, often when they are at their most vulnerable.
STAT News (Kate Sheridan) —
As the major digital therapeutics trade association, [the] Digital Therapeutics Alliance includes some of the nascent industry’s movers and shakers — including Pear, Akili, and Madison, Wis.-based Propeller Health, which produces devices that track how often people use a rescue inhaler — as members.
More than 30 companies in 10 different countries have joined the group; the alliance is intended to have an international perspective, Coder noted, so it doesn’t just understand issues companies may face in one particular country or with one particular regulator.
SAN FRANCISCO, June 26, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Blue Shield of California has introduced a new digitally based lifestyle medicine and health platform that can be personalized to each of its members’ individual health needs and preferences. The nonprofit health plan’s reimagined Wellvolution is a giant leap forward from traditional wellness programs with its distinctive consumer-focused approach that helps people holistically manage their health.
San Francisco, CA; (June 26, 2019) – Omada Health today announced a $73 million round of funding led by Wellington Management Company LLP. Wellington Management is an independent investment firm with more than $1 trillion of client assets under management. Omada will use the funding to fuel the continued expansion of its digital care program, including support for those with type 2 diabetes and hypertension, as well as those dealing with anxiety and depression.
STAT News (Brittany Flaherty) — Chronic diseases are costly in every sense of the word. Not only are they expensive to treat but they are the leading cause of death and disability in the United States, where more than half of U.S. adults have at least one of them. The CDC cites chronic diseases as a leading driver of the nation’s $3.3 trillion in annual health care costs.
Type 2 diabetes is one of the most common and expensive to treat chronic conditions. Nearly 30 million people in the United States are living with it, and 84 million have prediabetes, which can lead to the full-blown disease, though 90% of them don’t know they have it.
While there are steps people can take to prevent, manage, and treat chronic diseases like diabetes, heart and kidney disease, arthritis, asthma, and others, they are difficult to implement and even harder to maintain. Seeing an opportunity, an array of digital health companies have developed services to help people manage and treat these conditions.
Yesterday, CVS Health unveiled Vendor Benefit Management, a new service that will help CVS Caremark pharmacy benefit management (PBM) clients roll out and manage third-party health products.
As the service is applicable to both digital and non-digital health and wellness products, the company has decided to inaugurate its initiative by announcing Big Health — maker of the CBT-based sleep app Sleepio — as the first vendor participating in the service.
MedCity News — The research, which was published in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, involved 39 patients who have COPD and had at least one hospitalization or emergency room visit during the year prior to enrollment.
“We were encouraged to see that most patients were able to use the device without issue, and that around three-quarters of patients who performed the voluntary end-of-study survey noting the EIM [electronic inhaler monitoring] sensor was either ‘very easy to use’ or ‘easy to use,’” Attaway said.
In a comment sent to MedCity, Propeller Health CEO David Van Sickle added that the study “shows not only that digital health can decrease healthcare utilization for COPD, but also that patients find the tools easy to use and they can be readily adopted in today’s clinical setting.”