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Verily has launched a new virtual program to help patients manage cardiometabolic diseases with care teams and medications, and will become the latest company to offer GLP-1 drugs as part of its program.
The new program, named Lightpath, will treat diabetes, obesity, hypertension and other related conditions with teams of clinicians including endocrinologists, primary care doctors and coaches, augmented by AI tools, Verily said Tuesday. Like many other virtual care programs, it’s being marketed to insurers and employers as an add-on service to traditional insurance.
Verily is introducing Lightpath at a time when employers are struggling to control the costs of wildly popular weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound. Startups, legacy digital health companies and pharmacy benefit managers have jumped at the chance to develop products to help them manage demand from their workers.
Verily, the healthcare company spun out of Google parent Alphabet, says it will tailor care to individuals using data from medical records and devices such as continuous glucose monitors. GLP-1 anti-obesity drugs may be prescribed for patients being treated for weight loss, the company said.
Lightpath builds off of Onduo, Verily’s virtual care program launched with Sanofi in 2016 to help manage patients’ diabetes. The expanded program has the flexibility to treat a continuum of related conditions, and it aims to move patients from more intensive care to ongoing monitoring and support as they improve.
Myoung Cha“That dynamism of the program design with Lightpath is something that we think will deliver outcomes, but also really be cost-effective as well for the health plan and employer customers,” Verily Chief Product Officer Myoung Cha told Endpoints News in an interview. Cha joined Verily in February after serving as president of primary and urgent care startup Carbon Health, which struggled with losses and layoffs in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to The Information.
Verily aims to make Lightpath available for 2026, and will transition Onduo patients to the new program in late 2025. Cha said Lightpath may expand into tackling other chronic illnesses, though he didn’t say which ones.
The new program comes during a period of change at Verily. Former FDA official Amy Abernethy, who was Verily’s president of product development and its chief medical officer, left the company earlier this year. Verily also got a new president in January 2023 and cut 15% of its staff. After years of research and development, the company has been trying to transform into a commercial-focused organization, and leaning directly into patient care and support is one way to do so.
Cha said helping patients reach their weight goals — and then weaning them off of GLP-1s — is a short-term value proposition that Verily can bring to employers and health plans. But its ambitions go much further, and he said there needs to be longer-term consideration about the health outcomes and costs of the drugs.
That plus Verily’s data and research work, Cha said, will help “close the loop and bring those insights back into care delivery, so that we have more precise ways to understand who these drugs are for and for how long, and maybe who these drugs may not be for as well.”