Mike Payne on Behavior Change and Modification in Diabetes Care

head of commercial and policy, Virta Health.

While Omada Health’s Prevent program is designed for individuals with prediabetes, it can be adapted to patients who already have diabetes, because the program is built on behavior change and modification, explained Mike Payne, MBA, MSci, former chief healthcare development officer at Omada Health. Payne is now the

Transcript (slightly modified)

Are there any plans for Omada Health to create a program like the Prevent program but for people who already have diabetes?

You know, I think ironically at the moment where our name, fortunately, has really started to become synonymous with the [Diabetes Prevention Program], along with the YMCA’s, we’re looking to the future and figuring out how we can use this expertise that we’ve built to help other people. And the plain fact of the matter is, the expertise that we’ve developed a little bit of it is specific to people with prediabetes, but a whole lot of it is more general. It’s about behavior change and modification, behavioral science, classic behavioral science regardless of disease. And then there’s a fair amount of it that is about food, diet, sleep, stress, cognitive coping skills around those things to continue to make the right choices when there are challenges in your life.

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And all of those things, all of those 4 pillarsfood, sleep, exercise, stressthey’re the same things that face type 2 diabetics. Type 2 diabetics have a lot to manage. They have to manage drug. They have to manage device. They have to have close relationship with their physician. But drug and device do not make behavior change happen. You need the type of immersive, what’s called intensive behavioral counseling that we provide so we believe that in an Omada style program applied properly, clinically appropriately to the type 2 population is going to be the behavior modification and maintenance layer that really hits behavior change hard for type 2s.