Virta Health: Who Do You Seek to Serve?
If you missed the introduction to this series about GLP-1s and product insights in digital health, you can read it here.
Most of the digital health companies prescribing GLP-1s are B2C, but Virta Health is B2B2C. This business model has huge product implications.
Virta’s B2B value proposition is that their type 2 diabetes reversal program can deliver total gross savings of $13,212 per member over two years. How? By eliminating the use of expensive medications. At least, that was Virta’s positioning before prescribing GLP-1s for weight loss became mainstream.
Today, Virta has pivoted their approach to better align with the current market, emphasizing their ability to help their B2B customers navigate GLP-1 costs and utilization. They’re now positioning their product both as an alternative to GLP-1s and as a sustainable GLP-1 offramp. Virta does provide access to GLP-1s for some people, but by and large, their clinicians are net deprescribers.
It sounds great. Patients don’t want to be on a GLP-1 forever, and payers don’t want that either. However, what exactly is the alternative Virta’s proposing? What is Virta’s product? When you peel back the layers, Virta’s core product offering is helping patients lose weight by improving adherence to the ketogenic diet. Changing patients’ behavior (i.e. eating habits) is notoriously difficult, but Virta uses remote patient monitoring to ensure results.
As part of Virta’s program, patients are expected to weigh themselves every day on a scale that automatically transmits this data to an app. In addition, Virta users have to regularly prick their finger to measure blood glucose and ketone levels.
The challenge and opportunity here is to improve end-user sentiment. Someone on TikTok lamented that on the Virta program, eating fruit isn’t worth it because one piece of fruit, like an apple or a banana, would essentially wipe out her entire allotment of carbs for the whole day. On Reddit, a user commented, “Not even weight watchers is this intense 😂”
Virta demonstrates how a company’s product and business model are deeply intertwined. Because of their B2B2C strategy, patients are not Virta’s customers. Perhaps author and marketing expert Seth Godin said it best: “Choose your customers, choose your future.”