Changing the perception of obesity and redefining how it is treated.

Tech Brief

There are numerous companies that provide weight loss programs, but most of them leverage a short-term approach focused on lifestyle and behavior changes. These approaches have moderate success (~5% weight loss) but over half of the weight lost across participants is regained within two years or less. Intellihealth’s medical weight-loss treatment model is informed by the gold-standard, evidence-based interventions. Evolve has the competitive edge of being developed by a team of experts in obesity research and clinical practice and supports the delivery of comprehensive, individualized treatment plans that combine medical, lifestyle, and behavioral approaches and, when appropriate, pharmacotherapy. In many instances, Evolve patients have numerous physical and psychological comorbidities that must be accounted for during treatment. Another competitive edge is the proprietary algorithm that informs our clinician decision support tool. The data we capture, algorithm, and clinical decision support are all unique to Intellihealth. In addition to our treatment model, our results are clear differentiators. Where behavior-only approaches tend to average a mean weight loss of 5%, combining lifestyle interventions with pharmacotherapy is associated with 10-15% weight loss and long-term weight loss maintenance. Further, patients on our program receive intensive behavioral treatment and, when program goals have been met, the patient continues to receive treatment as part of a weight-loss maintenance program, which is extremely important when treating obesity as a chronic condition.

Problem Tech Solves

With ¾ of the country affected, obesity touches virtually everyone in one way or another. Misperception, stigma, and lack of resources have created a seemingly insurmountable treatment gap, which means all of the downstream consequences of obesity, such as diabetes, heart disease, cancers and many more, continue to rise. Intellihealth’s groundbreaking approach offers hope in an effective solution that works at scale. Intellihealth's software-as-a-service platform, Evolve, is a recommendation engine that combines patient information from a comprehensive health risk assessment (addressing contributors such as family history, current medications, sleep and lifestyle issues, genetic susceptibility, etc.) and data from the electronic health record with total-population data sets and insights to create an individualized treatment plan featuring diet, exercise, medications, and sleep, as well as personalized educational activities based on intensive behavioral therapy. The medication decision support tool, which provides automated data-driven pharmacotherapy recommendations, is a breakthrough innovation in precision medicine not found in any other online or telehealth weight-loss program. While some direct-to-consumer treatment solutions have received a lot of attention lately, they are expensive, one-size-fits-all (limited treatment protocols, not personalized) and don’t involve obesity medicine specialists. Behavior-only programs are popular but are limited in efficacy and bariatric surgery is only appropriate in more extreme cases. Evolve is built on a premier treatment model developed and refined by the foremost obesity medicine pioneers and experts and allows any provider to deliver expert obesity medical care. Evolve is also covered by insurance and available through trusted healthcare providers and health systems.

Validation

The effectiveness of Intellihealth's solution is supported by study data. In 2020, researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital published the results of a PCORI-funded trial in JAMA (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2772495), demonstrating the efficacy of Intellihealth's behavioral program in a population health setting. (They used Evolve's predecessor platform with a behavioral intervention alone; the new program leads to significantly better outcomes.) In the past year, Intellihealth won several awards, including the UCSF Digital Health Award (quarter finalist, 2nd year in a row), the 2022 UCSF Rosenman Innovators that honors select emerging medical device and digital health companies commercializing new products and services to improve medicine and benefit patients. The MedCity INVEST Precision Medicine Pitch Perfect contest for Health IT, the Women at Weill investment competition through Weill Cornell Medicine and Amplifyher Ventures, and the Havyn Hatch pitch competition for female entrepreneurs. In 2021, Intellihealth completed its electronic health record (EHR) integration across the entire NewYork-Presbyterian hospital system — one of the country's largest and most comprehensive health care delivery systems — demonstrating the platform's ability to scale. The new EHR integration enables NewYork-Presbyterian practitioners in any specialty to use Evolve with their patients who have obesity, and it allows treatment to be automatically recommended based on BMI or other criteria, bringing the latest treatment approaches to the attention of physicians who might not otherwise consider implementing weight-loss programs for their patients. Additionally, Intellihealth raised its seed financing round with support from Hearst Ventures, Connecticut Innovations, and The Venture Collective, among others institutional investors.