Cigna and digital diabetes prevention program Omada Health are once again expanding their relationship, offering Omada's services to all of Cigna's regional and national employer customers, representing a significant portion of Cigna members.

"We will be expanding in January of this year to our national and regional clients, which is a large percentage of Cigna’s book of business, but it will be with the clients so it won’t be 'Boom, everybody has it,'" Joan Harvey, Cigna's VP of consumer health engagement and behavioral health, told MobiHealthNews. "It’ll be working with those clients to expand it. I think many, many clients are extremely interested so there will be a lot of uptake."

As well as expanding out to a much larger number of employers, Omada and Cigna have worked together to integrate Omada Health with Cigna's digital offerings such as the myCigna mobile app.

"We’ve partnered to create something very integrated that makes it extremely simple for any Cigna client account to flip a switch and deploy the Omada program in a way that’s built into the existing infrastructure of healthcare," Omada CEO Sean Duffy told MobiHeathNews. "We’re talking the brass tax of filing claims and all the operational things it takes to make it happen."

Omada offers a digital implementation of the Digital Diabetes Program, a clinically validated program of coaching and lifestyle change that's supported by the CDC. In addition to virtualizing the program's 24-person support groups, Omada also implements connected technology to track participants and hold them accountable. Those tools include a wireless scale, a pedometer, and a mobile app to track food and activity.

One of the most notable aspects to the arrangement is that Omada takes on much of the risk — if the program doesn't deliver savings and outcomes improvements, Cigna and its employer customers don't have to pay. 

"We’re really impressed with the model in terms of how they’re doing diabetes prevention management, and we like the outcomes-based payment models," Harvey said. "We’re big on fee for value in terms of our philosophy and we really liked the structure of how their model was organized and the results that it delivered in our pilots, which is why we expanded that."

In 2015, Omada started out working with just four of Cigna's self-insured employers. It expanded the partnership for the first time in 2017 when Cigna made a $50 million investment in the company. Now it's expanding the collaboration even further.

"This is naturally the deepest integration we’ve done with a payer and I think that everybody benefits with that," Duffy said. "It allows Omada to partner with Cigna, which has significant scale in the space. It allows us to leverage Cigna capabilities to create a unique and differentiated experience for participants in any Omada program, and it allows Cigna customers to have ever more elegant experiences.