Omada Health’s Prevent Program For Prediabetes Publishes Two-Year Weight and A1c results
Twitter Summary: New results show Prevent program sustains 4.3% weight loss + 0.46% A1c reduction after 2 years, plus our interview w/ ppl behind Omada’s success.
Omada Health recently announced promising two-year results from its Prevent program, an Internet-based intervention based on the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP). Participants who completed Prevent lost an average of 4.9% of their starting body weight after one year and largely maintained that weight loss (4.3%) at two years. At this rate, someone with a starting body weight of 200 lbs. would have lost almost 10 lbs. after one year (weighing 190 lbs.), and then maintained the majority of that weight loss after a second year.
The new two-year results also showed a sustained benefit on blood glucose control, as measured by A1c. On average, participants that completed Prevent achieved a 0.40% A1c reduction at one year and a 0.46% A1c reduction at two years. This allowed many participants to move from the prediabetes A1c range (5.7% to 6.4%) to the normal A1c range (less than 5.7%).
As background, Omada Health’s Prevent program utilizes a unique, multifaceted, online approach with one-on-one support from a professional health coach (via phone and messaging), a private support group of other Prevent participants, online courses that share the DPP curriculum, a cellular-enabled weight scale, and tools to help them through the process. Omada focuses heavily on creating an excellent user experience, and some of the team comes from renowned design firm IDEO. To watch a video overview of the program, click here or check out the video posted below!
Though Prevent is primarily offered through employers and health plans who cover the costs of the program, it is eligible to anyone with cardiometabolic risk factors, including those without a formal diagnosis of prediabetes. To sign up, please visit this page. For anyone who wants to sign up independently, the program costs $130/month for the first four months, followed by $12/month for ongoing access to the program. Prevent offers a free two-week trial of the program as well. More information about joining Prevent can be found at this FAQ page.
Bonus! Our interview with Omada Health’s CEO Sean Duffy and Medical Director Dr. Cameron Sepah
Q: Have you seen any “super responders” so far in your results?
Mr. Duffy: Close to half of our participants have achieved 5% weight loss or more. Close to a quarter of them achieve 10% weight loss or more. Those can be considered super responders since 10% is a clinically significant benchmark. We even have some participants who reach 25% weight loss.
Q: What are the markers of someone who does really well and who does poorly in the program?
Mr. Duffy: Engagement seems to be the big marker. There’s a direct correlation with all the different engagement benchmarks and weight loss outcome. For example, participants who do all 16 of 16 lessons lose twice as much weight as participants who do any other number of lessons.
Q: What do you think is most misunderstood about Omada Health’s Prevent Program?
Mr. Duffy: Sometimes we get, “oh so it’s an app?” which makes me cringe a little bit, because the reason Prevent works is because it includes a lot of individual elements and instruments. Each one is used to improve the experience that works for people. Yes, there’s an app that you can download but the experience also involves you being put into a group, with a health coach, kicked off on a timeline, with a digital scale, curriculum that enfolds, packages – it is all pretty complex once you’ve gone through it. I think in the market it’s easy to think “oh it’s just an app” but then you forget about the people behind it, the framework, and all the different ingredients. That’s probably the most misunderstood.
Close behind that is that people tend to forget that we group participants on a timeline. We’re the only digital health company that clusters small groups together and kicks them all off on the exact same timeline towards a shared goal, which is such an important part of the behavior change literature.
Q: Do you do any personality screenings to try and identify what ways may be more effective for different people?
Dr. Sepah: We assess for people’s traits in terms of personality and also in terms of their state, if this is the right time for them to go through the program. We ask a lot of standardized questionnaires about how can we best personalize the program, in terms of what time they like to use it, what kind of coaching they prefer, and what makes them successful at changing other behavioral habits. We ask to better match their groups and better match their coach. The coach, the individualizing agent of the program, makes it a personal experience that caters to them. We are working on improving that assessment, those algorithms, and that coaching all the time.
Mr. Duffy: This area gets me the most excited. It’s so hard to run in-person experiments to try and personalize more and do interesting things because there’s no way to collect data easily. You can’t easily group people via an in-person Diabetes Prevention Program. You can’t say, “what if we had people from different places?” It becomes harder to measure questions at a micro level. But with a digital approach like ours, it becomes incredibly easy. We are thinking of a lot of interesting things this year and that will continue to personalize things even further.
Q: How will you scale Prevent in the coming years and bring it to more people at risk for type 2 diabetes? What are your largest concerns for expanding Prevent or for Omada in the future?
Mr. Duffy: You always want to make sure you’re delivering an amazing participant experience. The person, two years from now, will ideally be one of hundreds of thousands of people we’ll be helping, but he or she should feel that they are the only one in the program. There are ways to create that feel. A lot of last year was spent really thinking through what operational processes and assistance we had to have to make sure that this is the case.
-AJW/AB/MA
