Dive Brief:
- Highmark Health is teaming up with preventive health company Noom to offer weight management support to members at no cost next year, the companies announced Monday at the HLTH 2025 conference in Las Vegas.
- Highmark expects nearly 2 million of its 7 million members across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware and New York to be eligible for Noom’s programs, which cover weight loss, weight management, diabetes prevention and diabetes management.
- The partnership is intended to address rising costs associated with serving overweight and obese patients — on which the U.S. healthcare system spends about $173 billion annually — in part because they’re more likely to be at risk for other costly conditions, including hypertension, type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease.
Dive Insight:
The partnership with Noom aims to cut costs by treating weight management as preventative healthcare, according to Maria Baker, vice president of health strategy and delivery at Highmark Health.
“Yes, we are looking to take cost out of the system by helping to reduce the cost of members who are already sick. But this is about avoiding cost too,” Baker said. Studies have shown that weight loss of just 5% to 10% can reduce the economic impact of comorbidities, according to Highmark.
Still, Baker expects the program’s ROI to be “much longer term” than anything Highmark, which operates an insurance business and a 14-hospital network, has previously invested in.
“But that’s intentional,” Baker said. “We believe we need to shift the conversation ... away from, ‘How do we take sick people and make caring for them cheaper,’ to ‘How do we stop people from getting sicker?’”
The services are designed to help members improve their relationship with food and understand behaviors. Noom leverages tools that use artificial intelligence — including smart food logging, body scan technology and automated progress tracking — to provide users real-time insights into their weight loss program.
Meanwhile, the diabetes prevention program uses a curriculum approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to educate members about diabetes risk factors, while the diabetes lifestyle program helps users with food logging and medication tracking.
The digital health platform plans to roll out additional partnerships with health plans next year, Cody Fair, chief operating officer at Noom, told Healthcare Dive.
Noom's GLP-1 offerings will also be available to all Highmark Health members who report that they're currently taking GLP-1s.
