Onduo and scaling the virtual care model
Growing the virtual care model across the spectrum of health.
From the beginning, our vision at Verily has been to move healthcare from reactive and episodic treatment to proactive and preventive care. We committed early on to developing solutions to help people living with chronic disease co-produce their health. Supporting the type 2 diabetes (T2D) population was the right place for us to start. T2D impacts nearly 10% of the U.S. population and over 8% of the global population. While there are a lot of solutions currently trying to help people with T2D, we believe there’s still an opportunity to do more to bring the best care to people - leveraging products like continuous glucose monitoring systems (CGMs) and services like telehealth with specialists, in order to make the healthcare experience more actionable, accessible and personalized.
In 2016, we set out on a joint venture with Sanofi to launch Onduo’s virtual diabetes clinic. We recently restructured its ownership with Sanofi to enable Onduo and Verily to move faster, invest more and serve a much broader population of patients managing multiple chronic conditions. Sanofi has been a good partner on this journey, bringing deep pharmaceutical and commercial expertise in diabetes, and we’re pleased they will retain a small stake in the entity.
Onduo has helped thousands of people since its launch and is poised for broader uptake in partnership with major employers like Walgreens, health insurers like Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arkansas and Georgia, and most recently, life insurer John Hancock.
There’s now clinically-validated and powerful real-world evidence that Onduo empowers people to achieve health and disease-related goals in an engaging and highly satisfying way. Patients show evidence of sustained improvements in diabetes management, including significant reductions in hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c), an important marker of health, as recently published in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology. Onduo participants with the highest initial HbA1c improved their glycemic control, with an average decrease of 2.3%.
Change in HbA1c from initial measurement to follow-up stratified by initial HbA1c range. Dixon, Zisser, Layne et al. "A Virtual Type 2 Diabetes Clinic Using Continuous Glucose Monitoring and Endocrinology Visits." Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology. 2019.
The amazing work done to date at Onduo forms a cornerstone of Verily’s mobile health and disease management strategy. Verily has committed to investing more in the Onduo virtual care model for T2D. Our teams will continue building out a next generation platform that will help people live well, while managing their health holistically, even in the setting of multiple chronic conditions.
Together, Verily and Onduo are setting our sights on new and even more ambitious goals to scale the virtual care model across the spectrum of health. This was always part of the vision, and we now have the population, patient and clinical insights needed to scale the model to support the whole person and whole population.