Our Manifesto: How we’re increasing access

This moment is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve our healthcare system.

Before Ozempic® and Wegovy® were household names, I started building Calibrate to help my mom take back control of her health. Soon after, we established Calibrate’s ambitious mission: we wanted to change the way the world treats weight. That meant fundamentally redefining the standard of care for the largest category of chronic disease we’ve ever faced.

As Calibrate took shape, the herculean task in front of us became clear: to achieve our mission, we needed to upend longstanding paradigms within a broken healthcare system that values reactive, fee-for-service care over preventative care and long-term results.

Reimagining a broken system.

To understand the challenge before us, it’s important to contextualize Calibrate within an obesity treatment spectrum that is failing patients: on one end, there is a byzantine conventional healthcare system that prescribes one-directionally, and on the other end, we see a proliferation of telehealth platforms that sell prescriptions. This is emblematic of today’s fundamentally broken “sickcare” system: treating chronic disease in fee-for-service visits, where medications are prescribed, and doses increased over time. At Calibrate, we imagine a true preventative “healthcare” system where the combination of medication and purpose-built lifestyle intervention actually improves health over time.

It’s no surprise that given the status quo, the current treatment model for GLP-1 medications indicates these drugs should be taken for life. Studies show that upon stopping medication, patients who did not meaningfully improve their metabolic health along with weight loss will regain weight. However, evidence also demonstrates that without comprehensive habit changes, even patients who have uninterrupted access to medication are at risk of regaining weight over time. While Calibrate recognizes that this is the current clinical protocol, we believe there’s another way: Calibrate uniquely offers members a pathway off of medication rather than encouraging indefinite reliance on GLP-1 drugs.

Calibrate is built on the research-backed approach that medication should serve as a tool rather than the treatment. Our metabolic resets combine time-limited use of medication in conjunction with a goal-based program focused on key changes to food, sleep, exercise, and emotional health habits. Our program is purpose-built to shift an individual’s underlying physiology (including set point), and we only transition members off of medication after their weight has stabilized and they’ve fully adopted the tools they need to sustain their results.

Fundamentally increasing access to obesity treatment.

It cannot be understated that payors and providers working together to scale a new treatment model for chronic disease is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve our healthcare system.

Obesity isn’t going away, but medication alone used indefinitely is simply not a viable solution for combating the obesity pandemic. The skyrocketing costs associated with increased utilization are not sustainable for patients, providers, or payors. Payors simply cannot afford to continue to manage a chronic condition as widespread as obesity — along with the broader chronic disease treatment paradigm — with indefinite use of medication.

Value-based solutions are the answer to our obesity pandemic and they are the only way to meaningfully increase access to GLP-1 medications. We’re in a pivotal moment for this market — the price of GLP-1s combined with our current sickcare model of one-directional prescribing as chronic disease management are likely to bankrupt the U.S. healthcare system.

The future of obesity care delivers lasting outcomes while decreasing the total cost of care. That starts with educating payors on the value-based model that exists when the right kind of comprehensive, integrated GLP-1 treatment is delivered as a solution.

With this in mind, we developed two complementary products:

1. Metabolic Reset: Our suite of products that combine medication with our proprietary intensive lifestyle intervention to deliver results that last. We believe that medication is a tool — not a long-term treatment — and we have purpose-built our intensive lifestyle intervention to wrap around GLP-1 medication, creating a faster track to results and clearing a path to life off of medication.
2. Continuous Authorization: Our product for payors that ensures that the right patients receive the right medications for the right amount of time with the right programs to support and sustain improved health outcomes. We believe that increasing access to obesity treatment requires driving down the total cost of care across a population by recognizing that there isn’t just one giant treatment category for GLP-1s and that a patient with overweight might require a different approach than a patient with overweight and diabetes or a patient with obesity.

This pair enables us to guarantee outcomes, and sustain results after medication, and ultimately help bring down the skyrocketing cost of care.

We’ve always believed that increasing access to effective obesity treatment requires payors and providers to work together on the right care plan for each patient. Over the past two years — as traditional utilization management tools like prior authorizations have failed to contain the rising GLP-1 costs for payors, and demand for the drugs has continued to rise — we have brought data to payors demonstrating that Calibrate’s standard of care is effective at both sustaining long-term weight loss and decreasing the total cost of care across a population.

This has established Calibrate as the leading solution for payors to provide treatment at a total cost of care that works.

A cost-effective equation that will expand access to obesity treatment.

When we launched Calibrate, we knew we needed to accomplish three things. First, to prove that Calibrate works. Second, to prove that it works at scale. (It works and we’ve proved it scales.) And finally, to use these proof points to meaningfully expand access to cost-effective obesity treatment.

Our model combines medication with behavior change in a cost-effective equation that delivers lasting results after medication. This model could help hundreds of millions of people improve their metabolic health and halt their progression on the spectrum of cardiometabolic disease — by delivering a total cost of care that works at scale. By aligning incentives, driving results, and reducing cost, we will achieve our mission to change the way the world treats weight and our vision to put consumers back in control of their health.

Our enterprise partnerships are underpinned by our real results, and traction is unprecedented in the era of digital health, driven by a combination of our demonstrated results, GLP-1’s unprecedented wave of consumer demand, and the consequential decision by pharmaceutical manufacturers to use a dual label marketing strategy for GLP-1 medications.

Providing this solution for Enterprise allows us to align incentives for all stakeholders: the patient, the provider, the payor, and even the manufacturer. There is no doubt in my mind that Enterprise is the future for this category.