The Secret is Out: Virta Health strategy
In my dream job as a Co-founder & CEO of Virta Health, I meet and interview many Virta “outsiders” every week. Some of the more business oriented people often ask “Could you please tell more about your strategy and what you’re focused on next. And, of course, I’d be happy to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement first”.
That’s a sensible question to ask, but the “sign an NDA first” always makes me smile — our company strategy shouldn’t be a secret. In fact, it should be public. Reversing Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) at scale is a moral imperative and if somebody can do it better than we do by copying our strategy, please do so soon. Here’s our strategy and step by step execution plan:
1. Our big idea: from 2% to 2X fix in U.S. health care
Common chronic metabolic conditions account for at least $1 Trillion per year in U.S. health care costs. On a per capita basis, sadly, the cost of chronic diseases alone is as much as many developed nations spend in total in health care costs.
Meanwhile, too much of our health care businesses are about finding a 2% better or cheaper way of doing what we already do, eliminating waste, making an existing experience more convenient for the patient or even finding a clever way (“up coding”!) of getting paid more for the same thing.
Our big idea at Virta is that we can help chronically and metabolically unhealthy patients get so healthy that most or all of the related health care costs can be eliminated, improving outcomes not by 2% but 2X (sometimes even 10X).
Based on our already published & peer-reviewed results, we are quite confident that most of the “chronic and irreversible” diseases that cost more than $1 Trillion per year can be reversed. We are starting by reversing T2 diabetes, which costs more than $400 Billion per year in the U.S.
2. Virta Health strategy in five steps
One — Build it
Build a T2D reversing treatment by leveraging software (to transform care delivery, which we call “provider-led continuous remote care”) and our founders’ decades of research and clinical experience. (done)
Two — Test it
Test the T2D reversal treatment’s safety and efficacy in a prospective clinical trial and publish peer-reviewed results — and keep publishing more and more evidence over time. (done)
Three — Commercialize it
Commercialize the treatment by selling to all the health care entities, who pay for the ever-increasing health care costs with a simple promise: you can safely and sustainably reverse T2D and simultaneously make money — best of all, you only pay for results! (Win-win-win) (done)
Four — Leverage data & software to scale exponentially
Leverage data and software to constantly improve patient experience, outcomes and cost efficiency to be able to scale and expand the treatment to the entire obesity-diabetes continuum (e.g. pre-diabetes, obesity) and other geographies. (working on it, very hard)
Five — Expand with R&D
Repeat the above four steps for other complex metabolic health conditions, where we think we can deliver not 2% but 2X (or even 10X) better outcomes. (Many more news to come when we have more results to share)
While I can’t get into the very details now, some of our team is already at step Five, while great majority of our execution is focused on step Four in 2021: scaling our continuous remote care platform and treatments for T2D reversal (and related conditions).
That’s our strategy and we feel it’s a moral imperative to reverse T2D and many other conditions at scale — to save lives and tax payers’ money — which is one of the reasons I’m sharing our strategy here.
If you want to be part of the team making all this happen…please message me here.
