Nourish, a virtual nutrition provider, is launching a program that gives patients access to free cardiometabolic lab testing.
Nourish Labs will integrate blood testing into personalized nutrition care. The free basic panel will include key cardiometabolic markers like cholesterol, A1C and thyroid-stimulating hormone. An enhanced lab panel for insights into heart and hormone health will be available for a small add-on cost.
The objective measurement will improve treatment plans and strengthen patient engagement, executives say.
“We had just really wanted to, for a long time, bring it in-house and to be able to do this ourselves,” Aidan Dewar, co-founder and CEO of Nourish, told Fierce Healthcare in an exclusive advanced interview.
Nourish previously referred patients out to get labs. The basic panel, which Nourish will cover the cost of for members, will suffice for most, per Dewar. "Those are just really clear data points on how you’re progressing towards your goals.”
Patients will be able to get blood work through Nourish’s local lab partners, including Quest, LabCorp and BioReference. They will have access to their results through the Nourish app, which will also feature an artificial-intelligence-powered summary to help understand biomarkers and interpret the results. The team has “built a really cool experience,” Dewar said.
They can then further review the results with their Nourish dietitian. Patients can also track improvement over time with regular labs, which creates a feedback loop that empowers and engages patients and care teams, per Dewar. It also benefits payer stakeholders.
“At the end of the day, [payers are] trying to see that they’re getting great outcomes at a low cost and a great patient experience for their members. Core to that is the data,” Dewar said. “Us being able to get way more data points on our patients and use those to show how valuable the clinical outcomes we are delivering gets those payers really excited.”
When patients were previously referred out to third-party providers to get labs, they likely got their results via a PDF or portal with no solid way to interpret them without a follow-up visit. Patients could share it with their Nourish team, but that would require them to upload it. All of this adds unnecessary friction, per Dewar.
“The constraint to better health is behavior change,” Dewar said. “How can we make it as easy as possible to live a healthy lifestyle?”
The AI summary component in the Nourish app was built with providers in the loop. For patients that consented, Nourish collected their app interactions to train the AI. There are 6,000 providers on Nourish’s platform, and the company worked with many of them to validate the AI, according to Dewar.
The enhanced panel is intentionally limited to markers that are actionable. And, because labs are a core part of Nourish’s broader care model, the company can keep the pricing simple and avoid upsells, Dewar said, making the add-on affordable.
Dewar hopes that in the future, at-home testing will also be an option through Nourish.