Verily’s Onduo, a digital health platform for managing type 2 diabetes, is expanding to offer tools for hypertension and mental wellness. Photo credit: Verily

Following in the footsteps of its digital health competitors, Livongo and Omada Health, Onduo recently added programs for hypertension and mental wellness to its diabetes platform.

Given that these conditions frequently overlap, it’s no surprise that Onduo, a subsidiary of Alphabet’s Verily, expanded in this direction. But how will it differentiate itself from the competition?

Onduo CEO Dr. Vindell Washington said Onduo’s more individualized approach, which considers health factors outside of the clinic, sets it apart from others.

“Most solutions take what I would call the peanut-butter approach … where they say essentially every single diabetic patient on the plan needs x, or every single hypertensive patient on the plan needs y,” Washington said in an interview. “We know a lot of patients needs’ are driven by social determinants and some of their non-direct medical metrics. Just because your blood pressure is 170 over 110 doesn’t mean you need the same thing as the person with the blood pressure next door to you, depending on your support system, your ability to change your diet, etc.”

The company has taken other steps to expand the people it can serve. During the fall, it started hiring Spanish-speaking coaches and added a Spanish language option for its app, a feature that Washington said nearly half of Onduo’s clients had requested.

Onduo also began to build out a virtual clinic over the last year, for users who might benefit from a virtual visit with an endocrinologist, a different approach from most other digital health platforms in the space. That said, with Livongo’s recent acquisition by Teladoc, it won’t be difficult for it to connect users to virtual visits.

Washington, an emergency physician by background, said that while he wanted to be respectful of existing doctor-patient relationships, he also wanted to remove potential barriers for its users.

“There are points in time where a person is ready for change,” he said. “The last thing we want to do is say, they’re ready for change… good luck finding an appointment.”

Onduo, which was launched as a joint venture with Sanofi in 2016,  pulls in information from connected devices like continuous glucose monitors, as well as users’ interactions with the app, with their care team, and medical and pharmacy claims. Onduo uses this data to tailor messaging or clinical outreach.

So far, Onduo has drummed up users including Walgreens, Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield, CareFirst, and John Hancock.

That said, the last few years haven’t all been smooth sailing. Some of Verily’s leadership left last year, including former head of software Tom Stanis and former Onduo CEO Dr. Josh Riff, who both went to start their own ventures.

Sanofi also stepped back its involvement in Onduo after the pharmaceutical company’s broader strategy shifted away from diabetes and cardiovascular research. Sanofi still remains a minority owner of Onduo after it and Verily invested $500 million into the joint venture.

“A lot of what we’re deploying right now we learned out of those early years of innovations and partnership work with Sanofi,” Washington said. “We’re super grateful for that and they continue to be great partners going forward in this. And we think it’s beneficial for all of us to serve more in the community”

Going into the future, Washington said Onduo will bring in more behavioral health clinicians, such as therapists and psychiatrists. He also hopes to add additional languages to the platform.

“This whole-person centered approach breaks down if you have a really common chronic disease and we send you someplace else,” he said. “Supporting one’s mental wellbeing at the time of diagnosis was a really straightforward place for us to go. … That’s how we’re charting our path going forward.”

One thing that can be said definitively — irrespective of how successful Onduo or its competitors are — is that individual solutions are taking a back seat as providers and payers look for comprehensive solutions to manage chronic disease.