Babylon Health, a digital primary care provider, has launched personalized programs for high-risk members living with chronic conditions.
The chronic conditions targeted include diabetes, hypertension, anxiety, depression, low back pain and prenatal care. The care pathways were developed by Babylon’s technologists and primary care teams. Multidisciplinary care teams will support members as they manage their chronic conditions with these programs.
Babylon’s prenatal care program, for instance, will engage pregnant women with regular virtual touch points and digital tools weekly to assist with prevention and care, including education and mental health screenings, company executives said.
“It’s so important that we offer a service to women who are pregnant or shortly after birth and engage with these women,” Kimya Tarr, senior digital health manager at Babylon, said in a press release. “If we are able to break down barriers to care and help the mother get the care she needs, it's more likely the baby will be healthy, and we will have reduced the cost for the mother and the newborn.”
Babylon operates an integrated primary care model that leverages remote patient monitoring to intervene and treat sooner. The goal with the latest digital programs is not to develop algorithms that can treat complex conditions on their own, Chief Medical Officer Darshak Sanghavi, M.D., told Fierce Healthcare. Instead, the programs help automate the bulk of care that is formulaic—like medication adherence, health education and monitoring symptoms.
The programs will be offered all in one interface, so if a patient has more than one condition, they won’t need separate apps to manage them, Sanghavi said. The programs will be available to the company’s Babylon 360 customers in value-based care arrangements. This will help align incentives to drive down the cost of care. The goal is to drive down the rate of acute events and associated hospitalizations, executives said.
Digitizing helps execute care journeys more efficiently as the company continues to scale, Sanghavi noted. Babylon will be tracking engagement rates and other metrics to measure the programs’ success. Care navigators and clinicians will remain involved with patients: “If they’re not engaging and they’re not taking their medicine, that triggers the follow-ups,” Sanghavi said.
Babylon has grown rapidly. But as its revenue has expanded, so have its losses. After going public in 2021 via a blank-check company, the company announced a reverse share split last fall intended to boost the company’s stock price so it wouldn’t be delisted.
Additional programs for postnatal care, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease prevention and others are planned for the future. Babylon is also considering programs for acute conditions, according to Sanghavi, such as helping parents understand how to take care of a child’s ear infection after a visit.