Fruit Street Health’s patients have a weekly telehealth meeting with a registered dietician.
Fruit Street Health, a startup offering a virtual diabetes prevention program, raised $17 million in funding. Rather than turning to venture capitalists, the digital health startup has focused its efforts on raising funds from physicians, with more than 300 investing in its most recent round.
“It has been a privilege to be an investor in a company that respects, and is completely guided by, physician input,” said Dr. Veena Somani, a family medicine physician that invested in the company. “It is empowering to see clients lose weight, under the impact of food as medicine, and get their lives back through Fruit Street’s platform.”
CEO Laurence Girard sees an advantage in its unique approach. The startup regularly receives feedback from its physicians, who have experience working with its product and patients. The company’s name comes from the address of Massachusetts General Hospital, where it found some of its first investors.
“The whole idea was instead of working with a few VC firms and raising $15 million, we wanted to work with more physicians and have more of a grassroots movement,” Girard said.
The company is now valued at $55 million.
Fruit Street Health’s story might sound a little bit familiar. It’s a digital health startup developing a diabetes prevention program. It can sync with users’ Fitbits, glucometers, wireless scales and blood pressure cuffs.
But the New York-based startup has found ways to differentiate itself from longer-running competitors, such as Omada Health and Lark. Rather than focusing texting with coaches or an AI chatbot, Fruit Street Health’s system is centered on a weekly group video chat. Registered dieticians deliver the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s diabetes prevention program through a telehealth consultation.
Members participate in weekly group classes, and also share photos of their meals, with the dietician providing feedback. By focusing on group classes, Fruit Street Health allows users to access its platform at a lower price, for just $20 per month.
“You can tell someone to take more steps and remind them to weigh themselves. What gets people to motivate themselves is a human being having an actual emotional connection with you,” Girard said. “The model of group accountability… it’s something that’s been proven in health care but hasn’t come into the telemedicine space for some reason.”
Girard founded the company in 2014, when he was planning to go to medical school. He had been volunteering at a local emergency room and taking nutritional epidemiology classes online. He realized that a lot of the patients he was seeing come into the ER with conditions like type 2 diabetes may have able to prevent it with lifestyle changes.
Girard initially started Fruit Street Health as a project, and it just kept going. The company currently sells its platform as a benefit for self-insured employers and health plans. For example, Girard said one Fortune 25 company is offering it as a benefit to its employees, and four commercial health plans are also rolling out its software. The company is preparing for large growth in this space, with one partner enrolling several patients.
But as the company strikes more partnerships, Girard also wants to build out the number of people who can use Fruit Street Health directly.
“Everyone’s so focused on getting health plans to pay for diabetes prevention. But as a result, you’re only getting people who have access to insurance or a big self-insured employer,” he said. “We can find a way through telemedicine to make a low-cost direct to consumer model.”
Photo Credit: Zoom Video Communications
