Springbuk is partnering with digital health company One Drop to provide employers with diabetes care through AI technology. One Drop’s diabetes management tool, which helps employees manage blood sugar, reduce stress and improve overall health, will now be available to Springbuk users at no additional cost.
“Employers have been fighting [diabetes] for decades, and many are making [health benefit] investments without meaningful proof,” says Rod Reasen, co-founder and CEO of Springbuk, an Indianapolis-based company that offers healthcare analytics software. “Springbuk enables employers to identify employees that are going to have major chronic conditions. [But] employers often said, ‘Now what? How do I solve these issues?’ after they purchased our service.”
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More than 30 million people in the United States have diabetes, and 84 million American adults are considered prediabetic. In 2017, the total economic burden of diagnosed diabetes in the U.S. was $327 billion, including $237 billion in direct costs and $90 billion in reduced productivity, according to the American Diabetes Association. Individuals with diagnosed diabetes have healthcare costs 2.3 times higher than someone without diabetes.
Springbuk’s Health Intelligence software allows employers to forecast and analyze if their population is at risk for certain health issues, including diabetes. Once diabetes is identified through Springbuk’s software, employees can enroll in the One Drop program, which provides users with a digital tool to monitor medication, food and physical activity, as well as blood sugar, blood pressure and weight. The programs, AI and predictive insight help employees to understand how their disease is progressing and what steps they can take to manage it, says Jeff Dachis, CEO and founder of One Drop.
“If you’re looking at improvement in the lives of people with diabetes, there are huge costs associated with outcomes that are not great,” Dachis says. “If you as an employer can offer a series of wellness and health solutions that enable people to feel better and cost less, it’s imperative that you do so.”
This is not the first time Springbuk has partnered with a health technology company. Last January, the company
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When employees begin using One Drop, they receive one-on-one guided care from a coach. The smartphone app integrates blood pressure, fitness tracking and food logging data to get an overall picture of employees’ health, Dachis adds. One Drop's proprietary machine learning technology — based on health data collected from 1.2 million users — can help advise employees on the best way to address their conditions.
“Our data-driven healthcare enables employers to make better choices and avert costly, and potentially adverse, decisions,” Dachis says. “We believe that there’s an opportunity to think in a preventative way that allows people to change their behavior.”
