A Fit4D certified diabetes educator or CDE speaks with a Fit4D user.
Diabetes patient support business Fit4D has inked a deal with Humana to provide its diabetes coaching tool to high-risk Medicare PPO members in North Florida. Fit4D also partnered with digital health business Glooko in a deal that will provide coaching support to Glooko customers to provide contextualized lifestyle tracking.
The deals are significant because they are part of Fit4D CEO and Founder David Weingard’s plan to continue to scale his nine-year-old business further in each of its distribution channels. He talked about his company in a phone interview with MedCity News earlier this month.
Fit4D’s coaches are certified diabetes educators (CDE) who reach users in a variety of ways phone calls, texts, emails and other mediums. Weingard said many newly diagnosed patients can be in a state of denial about their chronic condition and can’t quite believe they have diabetes. That’s why the human contact of Fit4D’s coaching support is critical. Weingard knows what he’s talking about because he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in his 30s. He credits a CDE with helping him cope with the diagnosis and manage his condition.
Fit4D Founder and CEO David Weingard
The value of a health coach is that they can help build trust and a rapport with people and help them not only come to terms with their condition but also manage it, he said.
“Those people are not going to a website to sign up for a program or downloading an app,” said Weingard. “They are out there and need someone who will call them and say, ‘I have your back.'”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The collaboration with Glooko is also interesting because Fit4D caters to pharma customers as well as a way of validating the effectiveness of and improving adherence to drugmakers’ medications. Glooko works with Novo Nordisk to develop personalized digital diabetes management tools and it also collaborates with Roche on tools to support Roche’s devices.
Weingard noted that 40 percent of patients who are prescribed a diabetes medication stop taking it. So the company uses its technology to improve CDEs reach so it can improve medication adherence. Fit4D works with pharma companies such as Sanofi. But it also has diversified its business to include customers such as Weight Watchers and Acacia Network, a Latino accountable care organization.
Fit4D has a business-to-business-to-consumer model so physicians tend to be the ones that inform the patients about its service. Payers provide a list of their members and the company reaches out to them. He noted that physicians tend not to regard Fit4D as competition but more as additional support that makes their jobs easier.
For Humana members, Fit4D will be introduced to them both via external outreach communication such as email as well as providers talking with patients about it.
Weingard noted that the company will make public more partnerships this year.
“You will continue to see partnerships announced with pharma, payers, and ACOs that will come online this year,” Weingard said. “You also will start to see technology partnerships…These tech partnerships will leverage data to make the coaching experience richer.”
