As the buzz around GLP-1 medications grew to a fever pitch over the past two years, many digital health and telehealth companies quickly added programs to prescribe anti-obesity drugs.
Omada Health instead focused on building out its weight management program, including a GLP-1 care track, that provides support and wraparound services to health plan members and employees who are taking GLP-1 medications.
The virtual chronic care provider is now jumping into the GLP-1 market and will start prescribing the drugs in 2026, the company announced Thursday. That service will be available nationwide next year.
Omada's announcement came just hours after the White House announced deals with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to sell their weight loss drugs at cut-rate prices to patients in the U.S.
"Omada is preparing for the next era of obesity care—one with broader access to GLP-1 medications of various types and price points," said Sean Duffy, CEO and co-founder of Omada Health, in a statement. "The White House’s recent pricing announcement reinforces our direction. Omada is uniquely suited to meet this moment as the conversation shifts beyond ‘Can patients get these drugs?’ to ‘Can we help members use them effectively and safely for long-term outcomes?’.”
Omada’s GLP-1 care companion solution can include nutrition guidance, education and a care team of health coaches, cardiometabolic specialists or exercise specialists. This new capability expands Omada’s existing offering by allowing prescribing and medication management from licensed providers trained in obesity care to be available in all 50 states. The new capability will provide employers with additional choices on how they support their populations, to align with benefit strategy goals and to optimize anti-obesity medication spend and outcomes, executive said.
Omada's decision to offer prescribing capabilities for anti-obesity medications, specifically GLP-1s, was driven by customer demand for integrated services, Wei-Li Shao, president at Omada Health, said.
Payers and employers are facing two big challenges in obesity and weight management: ensuring appropriate medication use and managing costs effectively. Omada's program that combines prescribing capabilities with its behavior change programs addresses those challenges, Shao said.
"Customers are asking for prescribing plus behavior change or lifestyle intervention to be seamless and integrated, such that the first prescription gets written and then there is a direct, seamless, integrated flow directly into a lifestyle intervention behavior change program that has been proven to work. It's all about closing that gap and making in-between visit care actually even more accessible and more effective at scale," Shao told Fierce Healthcare in an interview.
Omada, which supports diabetes, obesity, hypertension and musculoskeletal conditions, launched its GLP-1 Care Track in 2023 in response to client requests. It has since supported more than 100,000 members taking GLP-1s. Omada ties remote monitoring devices with coaching and artificial intelligence to help consumers control their chronic diseases. The company works with 2,000 employers and plans today.
The company recently released new data supporting its GLP-1 care track approach. When coupled with wraparound lifestyle support, 63% of Omada members maintained or continued to lose weight 12 months after discontinuing GLP-1s. At one year post-discontinuation, members showed just 0.8% average weight change. The analysis was based on 816 patients.
For the past few years, the conversation among health plans, pharmacy benefit managers and employers has been focused on accessibility and affordability for GLP-1s, Shao said. "With the drop in price, we believe that conversation is going to shift to, how do I support my employees and members to make sure they get high-quality care and the outcomes they deserve. If anything, creating a seamless, continuous care solution that merges and integrates prescribing and behavior change seems to us to be even more important going in the future," he noted.
The healthcare industry is "on the precipice of significant change" with weight loss and anti-obesity medications, Shao noted.
"The arrival of oral GLP-1s alongside injectables are going to represent a situation where things will become more complex. There are more indications, there are more formulations. There are now differences in pricing, such that somebody needs to come in and figure out exactly how to use the right formulation, the right form of GLP-1 in the right patient for the right time, given their life circumstances, and do it consistently with high quality and safety across all 50 states," he said.
Omada's prescribing capabilities "address many of today's market needs," Duffy told investors and analysts during the company's third-quarter earnings call Nov. 6. "It positions us to better support the next wave of oral and injectable GLP-1 therapies, which, we believe, will span various price points in the future," he said.
Duffy noted that Omada's approach combines behavioral intelligence based on lessons from health metrics, readiness and engagement data from serving more than 100,000 GLP users, behavioral support to drive outcomes and "flexibility that enables employers to tailor their GLP-1 benefit strategies against their unique needs."
The company's GLP-1 care track solution is seeing strong growth but still represents a smaller percentage of the company's overall growth so far, Shao said. Omada's strong revenue growth—up 49% in the third quarter to reach $68 million—was driven in large part by its standard cardiometabolic programs and adoption of multicondition solutions, executives said during the third-quarter earnings call.
"We know that people that suffer from obesity oftentimes have diabetes, oftentimes have MSK conditions, oftentimes have hypertension or high blood pressure, and our buyers are increasingly understanding that now," Shao said. "For several years now, we've had a strategy to talk to our customers about treating people as people, not as diseases, realizing that, unfortunately, they have multiple conditions or diseases going on at one time, and that multiprogram platform approach has allowed us to actually sell more programs into a single customer."
Omada Health, which went public in June, also tightened the bottom line, reducing its net loss to $3 million, or an adjusted loss of 6 cents per share, compared to a loss of $9 million in the third quarter of 2024. The company's third-quarter results beat Wall Street expectations as the consensus estimate was for revenue of $61 million and a quarterly loss of 10 cents per share.
For the first time, the company delivered a positive adjusted EBITDA quarter with the third quarter landing at $2 million compared with a $5 million loss at the third quarter a year ago, Duffy told investors.
The company's membership grew 53% year over year in the third quarter to 831,000 members, according to its financial results for the period. That total includes 79,000 net new members during the quarter and 259,000 year-to-date, Shao said during the earnings call.
Omada also continues to build outs AI tools and launched Meal Map, an AI-powered nutrition feature that focuses on nutrient quality rather than calorie counting. The new features builds on OmadaSpark, an AI-driven nutrition education tool introduced earlier this year. Meal Map combines AI-powered instant feedback with human care teams to help members in its cardiometabolic programs understand the nutrient quality of their food choices.
The company also is integrating AI for its workforce, including generative AI tools for its care teams and gen AI coding copilot tools for its engineering teams to "reduce the cycle time and increase throughput from lines of code to actual product," Shao said.
As the company looks ahead to 2026, Duffy told investors that he sees two clear investment themes next year, or what he calls "the year of the Gs."
"The first 'G' is GLP-1s. We plan to invest in both the prescribing offering announced today as well as other improvements that can deepen our solutions across the GLP-1 life cycle. The second 'G' is GPTs and broader AI. We plan to keep weaving AI into many layers of our program, including more tools for members and the care team experience as well as leveraging these tools to drive internal productivity amongst our teams. We believe these investment areas can add value as we seek to widen our competitive moat and fuel sustainable, responsible growth," he said.
Omada raised its full-year revenue outlook to between $251.5 million and $254.5 million, up from a prior range of $235 million to $241 million. Its outlook also includes adjusted EBITDA in a range of a $2 million loss to breakeven, up from a prior range of a $9 million to $5 million loss.