We caught up with Amit Shah and he discussed Virta's mission to reverse Type 2 diabetes and obesity through personalized nutrition and continuous remote monitoring. He also discusses he challenges of scaling Virta's pioneering clinical, technology, and business model - including evolving massive workflows and systems amid rapid growth and how recent GLP-1 obesity drug approvals are tailwinds driving adoption of Virta’s more sustainable, cost-effective solution.
We caught up with Amit Shah and he discussed Virta's mission to reverse Type 2 diabetes and obesity through personalized nutrition and continuous remote monitoring. He also discusses he challenges of scaling Virta's pioneering clinical, technology, and business model - including evolving massive workflows and systems amid rapid growth and how recent GLP-1 obesity drug approvals are tailwinds driving adoption of Virta’s more sustainable, cost-effective solution.
Amit Shah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitrshah1/
Chris Hoyd: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishoyd/
For the full YouTube video: https://youtu.be/Fl-_SsHEz0Y
Virta Health Website: https://www.virtahealth.com/
Virta Health YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/virtahealth
Chris Hoyd
Welcome back to Product in Healthtech, a community for health tech product leaders by product leaders. I'm Chris Hoyd, Head of Product Innovation at Vynyl. Today I sat down with Amit Shah, CEO at Virta Health - a digital health company on a mission to reverse type two diabetes and 100 million people. Amit spoke with us about how he has helped lead Virta's growth from around 20 people when he joined to over 500 now, how the culture at Virta drives internal alignment as the company scales and how the boom in GLP1s is created a major tailwind for Virta. Let's jump into that conversation. Welcome Amit. Super excited to chat with you today. Let's dive right in. So you are the COO of Virta. Can you talk to us about what Virta is is a company.
Amit Shah
Absolutely and first, Chris, thank you. Very excited to be here also and to share a little bit more about Virta. So you know, to hit the baseline for all of our listeners to start out - Virta health is a digital health company that provides a clinically proven treatment to safely and sustainably reverse type two diabetes, obesity, and other chronic metabolic health diseases. And I use the word reverse very purposefully, we deliver personalized nutrition, continuous monitoring and clinical support through a tech platform. And our model integrates technology and clinician care to deliver outcomes like sustained 10% weight loss and an average A1C reduction of about 1.2 points, all while we eliminate or stop the use of drugs like insulin and GLP1s. And so our unique proposition there is a sustainable lifestyle change without medication or surgery.
Chris Hoyd
Incredibly cool. Okay, so let's, let's talk now about your role in Virta. And maybe we can start with your background. How did you get to where you are?
Amit Shah
Yeah, a tremendous amount of luck, to be honest. I grew up a little bit around the world, but primarily in Michigan, and then went to the University of Michigan to study engineering. As a side note, it's been a great football year for us - so Go Blue. After the University of Michigan, I went to a consulting company, I worked at McKinsey for a few years. And that was out in LA. And then after a couple years at McKinsey, I got the opportunity to do whatever I wanted to next McKinsey said, hey, you know, we'll we'll pay for business school, but, you know, you can take some some time. And and I made the decision to start a company. So a couple of friends and I started a company that made solar products for rural India. And that was a transformative experience for me in a couple of ways. The first is it while I lived in India is actually when I met my wife, we won't go down that path. But for a variety of reasons - that, of course, is the biggest transformation. But the second is in building that company. I learned how much I loved working on products and services that improve the quality of life for people. And so it was with that knowledge that when I came back to the States, I went to business school and post business school I wanted to find a job, an industry, a place to work, where I could continue to work on something where what we did day to day improve the quality of life for people. And so where I first landed was a company that was called Paladina Health. It's now called Everside Health. It's based here in Denver, and it was a direct primary care business. I was there for a few years. And then I actually got cold outreach from the CEO and co founder of Virta Sami Inkinen. And, and he shared at the time, this was 2016, Virta was in stealth mode. And so he shared a little bit about what Virta was doing. And this is where a lot of the luck came in first, and I got the cold outreach - and second that, that I didn't immediately dismiss it when he said we reverse type two diabetes at that time. That was not not something that that you know, today, if you Google that, and thanks to the work that we've done over the last eight years, there's some belief that that is possible. That wasn't true back then. And so to make a long story short, what swayed me was getting to talk to some of our earliest clinical trial patients, the life change that they saw, reminded me and actually was even greater than some of what I saw at the company that we started in India. And I remember thinking to myself - man, if I could work here, I have to. And so that started that journey. I started leading our operations team in 2016. And fast forward to today, I have the joy of leading basically all of our care delivery, which as we'll talk about is a combination of product and technology. And then I always like to say this on the side, while Virta is where I spend a lot of my time. I also have two kids under the age of four and a Goldend Doodle, and a wonderful family here in Denver so that I'm very lucky around that front to.
Chris Hoyd
I remember when I first heard Virta's sort of reverse type two diabetes pitch, I think it was like at Rock Health, maybe 2018 or something, and it kind of blew my mind. I was like, That is a beautiful vision. Okay, very cool. Well, let's jump into your your role and kind of what your team does within Virta. So, with such an ambitious vision, I imagine, you know, there's been no shortage of challenges that you and your team have had to address in terms of how do you achieve those outcomes? How do you achieve them at scale? You know, I'm sure the there's a long list here of things we could dive into. But if you could, you know, maybe high level, what are some of the major challenges you face, scaling that vision? Y
Amit Shah
Yeah, and as most of our listeners will know, scale in and of itself, is a challenge. And so I'll make an early and often invitation throughout our conversation, where if you have thoughts on the things that I'm sharing and the challenges that we're seeing, you know, please, please feel free to reach out. But I'll provide a couple of examples. The first one will be on technology and processes. The first patients we enrolled at Virta, as I shared in my origin story, were for our clinical trial. And so when we first signed commercial contracts, we basically, you know, lifted and shifted, we use the same clinical trial process to enroll patients, we therefore then built technology to support that process. And continue to kind of in the early days scale that for our commercial contracts, as the first couple years past, we realized that, you know, what you need to do for a clinical trial is actually quite different than what you need to do to have a scaled technology first digital first approach to a patient onboarding, when you're onboarding, you know, 1000s of people on a weekly, daily, weekly basis. And so we've had to continue to rebuild our onboarding processes, while we've been rapidly scaling. And so most recently, over the last year, we completely replaced the technology infrastructure to enable both scale in and of itself, but also personalization of that process at scale. So that was driven by our product development leaders. And they really spend time thinking about what we would need for the next three to five years. Though, as you know, when you're scaling a business, as many of our listeners might have experienced, what you think you need for the next three to five years, might only last you 18 months, and it might not be the right thing, you know, 36 months later. And so, while we feel like you know, this is a challenge that we've we've kind of met for now, we have a lot more of an understanding that we have to keep evaluating this and keep thinking about this. A second scale challenge, I would be remiss without mentioning is around scaling teams and scaling teams, scaling people always has has complexity. And so we have, you know, obviously, since the early days, when I joined Virta was kind of 20-30 folks. Today, we have over 500 teammates, and so that, you know that in and of itself, the communication challenge posts COVID remote work challenge, but I'll focus specifically on how we deliver care. So much of the magic of Virta is how we seamlessly integrate clinician care with technology. And so we're constantly changing workflows, as we integrate new data while we're trying to scale. So clinicians who have been here over the course of many years, have seen many iterations of workflow and technology. And for most clinicians, that's different, right? You know, it's not the same workflow, or the same clinical decision support system that has been in the EMR for decades. You know, it's literally, we're updating things. Sometimes, quarterly, weekly, monthly. And so the way we've been able to surmount some of those challenges, I would say, the primary underlying piece of that is culture. We all drive towards the same North star, whether you're on the technology team, or you're on the clinical team, and that's to deliver transformational and sustainable clinical outcomes. And so when you make that the North Star, and you make that the culture that people are most driven by, you know, that's what we're all here to do. I think it helps the individual in the moment N=1 decision making. And so when we are changing workflows, if something doesn't make sense, it also bubbles up pretty quickly. And so we've been able to, we've been able to kind of combat that with a good mix of culture and shared metrics and continuous investment in the operating system. But I'll also candidly share we're currently growing really fast and and, you know, it would be remiss not to say that there aren't things today that we're working on on scaling. So, um, this is an ongoing challenge and an ongoing source of excitement for us.
Chris Hoyd
That is beautiful. Okay, so I'm sure you've heard the phrase, 'you ship your org chart'. And I think the, the antidote to that, as you know, in my experience really has been, I think, what you described in terms of creating a culture around a North Star. So that's, you know, impressive to hear that you've achieved that level of alignment. Could you talk a little bit about how you as COO, make sure, you know, this large team that you're now overseeing, embodies the culture that that you want them to?
Speaker 1
I appreciate that question. And I also want to, again, be candid, because I think that's what's most helpful. I want to say we aspire to what, what I've been sharing, we aspire to live the mantra of one team. And I believe that aspiration along with some of the tools and rituals that I'll share in a moment, we're close. But I also don't want to kid anybody. I mean, nothing, no place is perfect, and nothing is perfect. And I think that, you know, while we aspire, we're also constantly working on it. So a few of the things that we have done to drive that alignment, to kind of drive that culture. First, I think I love this, you ship your org chart, I actually hadn't really heard it said that way before. But I would say that that's true. And so as we've scaled, we've really worked on creating orgs. And specifically teams, you know, my view and our view at Virta, is that really everything gets done in teams of somewhere between five and 15. You know, that's where all the work really happens. And so we try to structure those teams with a couple of key attributes, the first attribute that we try to have is, is a clear end user, especially on product development is a clear end user that you're serving, and whether that end user is a patient, or a member. And again, that could be subdivided, we could segment that further down, though I won't at this moment. Or we build internal tools. So whether that whether that end user is a clinician, or whether that end user, we also build tools, because we're a b2b2c business, we also build tools for the b2b side. So whether that that end user is a client, we try to make it very clear who the end user is. The second thing we do is try to make it very clear what the North Star metrics are. So what is that team of five to 15 people looking to accomplish with that user. And that is obviously something we have an OKR process, and we're looking at, you know, updating and changing and iterating on kind of constantly. And then the third attribute is cross functionally aligned. And so a team is not a team, we try not to think of our teams, in terms of the word that we use internally is guild, the design team is a guild, they bring a set of expertise. But as a designer, you're working on a, you know, the patient app team, the member experience team. And that is the team that you're bringing your cross functional expertise to, for that end user in service of those metrics. And so that's the third thing is, is that we try to have cross functional teams with the relevant and required people on the team. So again, clinicians are represented on the member experience team, because they have disproportionate say in the member experience, and we want to make sure that's integrated in the way we do product development. And then the fourth thing that our fourth kind of mantra for our fourth thought on how we structure teams is to be always learning. And so we want to create a hypothesis driven approach on what we decide to build and to make sure that we can test that and always be learning.
Chris Hoyd
That is an incredible structure. I love the thought that went into that, that does sound like a kind of a pretty brilliant foundation to to scale from and I'm curious where the the sort of PMS, the product leaders, where does that group that guild, you know, fit under under the COO or under another department and how do you kind of make sure that they are connecting with the clinicians, as you said, it's a super important perspective and and the rest of the organization in the cross functional sort of communication, how do you how do you make sure that that happens? What's your structure for that?
Speaker 1
We do have guilds - The guilds are teams that that exist, right? And, and one one of the ways I like to talk about it is that product as a guild or design as a guild, analytics as a guild, I won't keep going down all of them, you get the point. Having a leader and an expert in that guild is important for you to be able to contribute to the team that you're on the squad that you're on, requires a continuous honing of that guild expertise. I am I did not play football growing up but I'm referencing it on from my knowledge of Michigan football, you know, you have a tight ends coach and a quarterbacks coach and a defensive line coach, and those coaches are, are honing that craft. But them being really good makes the team better. And so that's how we think about that. So similarly with product to answer your question, we do have a product team and a product leader, we have a Chief Product Officer, and he, you know, he's he's working on improving that, and a couple of other guilds that report up into him. When I view my role as COO, I'm stitching together product and technology as well as operations, and making sure that all of those things are serving our again, true purpose, which is to deliver transformational outcomes to reverse diabetes and obesity and metabolic health conditions for individuals at scale. And so we have these guilds. And then we have these teams. And in these teams, again, the relevant stakeholders are represented. And so I am not the only place in the org structure where clinicians are providing direct feedback to the PMs. In fact, if you're the PM on our member experience adoption squad, you have clinicians that are on your squad, part of their job is to sit down with you, and to think through the problems that those specific members are going through, and how we could leverage the combination of technology and clinicians to solve those problems to make more people successful in the transformative lifestyle changes that we're trying to drive.
Chris Hoyd
Okay, very cool. Thanks for sharing that. I want to zoom out a little bit now. So for anyone watching this familiar with Virta, are you familiar with the healthcare industry in the US? There are, you know, massive sort of businesses and business models that have been established around caring for folks with diabetes. So I'm just curious with, you know, with your, you know, kind of beautiful vision of reversing diabetes, have you encountered any headwinds? You know, by sort of focusing more upstream on sort of the behavioral, nutritional, maybe a bit of a less sort of critical healthcare related approach to this, what's that been like?
Speaker 1
We have encountered headwinds. In fact, as we might get you later in our discussion, right now, at this particular moment, you know, early 2024, here is where we're experiencing some tailwinds. But I would say, you know, I've been at Virta, for almost eight years, we've had some some periods of of great headwind along the way. And I liken it to any company that's trying to be disruptive, again, going back to even the verbage, reverse type two diabetes, reverse obesity, reverse metabolic health conditions. These were these prior to Virta's existence were seen as chronic and irreversible conditions. In fact, that's how the American Diabetes Association described it 'chronic and irreversible'. And so when you come out of the gate and say, we're going to reverse these conditions, you can expect some headwinds. And again, I'll liken it to other disruptors. Netflix in the, you know, early 2000s. There, there headwinds were probably primarily from blockbuster, you know, and people didn't watch movies streaming and weren't used to getting movies in the mail. They're used to going down the street and getting them from a store. And so for diabetes and metabolic health, the status quo has been our has been our primary headwind. The interesting thing is that the status quo over the last 40 years has only caused the problem to grow exponentially. That is, really manifests itself in three ways. The first way that that manifested itself is with science, again, to go back again to my origin story, and some of what we've spoken about when when I started at Virta, and in 2015, and 2016. But our first patients at Virta, were from a clinical trial. And that's not common for a digital health company to start with a clinical trial. But we did it because we wanted to hone in on what is unique and specific to Virta, which is that we can reverse diabetes and obesity and metabolic health. And we wanted to have data around that that we could then use to to make that claim and make it clearly. And so in the early days, myself included, and I first heard about this reversal concept. People were incredulous. And over the years because of the work of our data and our research team and our clinical teams. In 2020, or 2021, the American Diabetes Association actually referenced some of our work to say that now nutrition is a frontline therapy for type two diabetes. And so we've come a long way. So again, that early headwind that has now you know, that we've made made good progress on a second way that that headwind has manifested is in our business model. We were one of the first digital health companies And certainly, you know, this is still extremely unique in health care. But we're one of the first digital health companies to put 100% of our fees at risk, to show how much we stood behind what we're doing. And at least when I got into health care over a decade ago - makes me feel old - value based care was seems like a buzzword and was growing. We are we are truly value based and 100% of the dollars are at risk for delivering on outcomes. And again, that's just not how our healthcare system works. So, but we did that, again, because an early headwind was, you know, does this work? Will it be able to scale can it work, and again, that's now a headwind that has turned into a tailwind. Now, you know, clients are very happy with that. And we have been able to show that we could put our money where our mouth is. And then the third headwind, I would say, has been around individuals, we educate and empower people with metabolic disease so that they can reverse their chronic conditions and improve their health. You know, for many folks, the status quo is not that, you know, the way our healthcare system is built to lean into some of the way that you ask the question, the responsibility of the care providers - and I know, this isn't how care providers think about it, but the responsibility of the care provider, at least from an economic standpoint ends when you've told the patient to do something, you counseled them on doing the thing for us to relate it to the business model, you know, our economic goal is to get you to do the thing is to make sustainable behavior changes, to improve your health. And so that is, that's a third area that, you know, is is a headwind, you know, where we are, we are endeavoring to do something a little bit more. And for many individuals that have come to us, they've come to us from this system, that they've tried many things, and they have not been successful in doing those things. And so when Virta works for them, it's absolutely game changing. Game changing to the level of, you know, we have multiple patients, and now have tattooed this beautiful logo on their body because that is what this life change has meant to them. So yeah, we do experience some, some headwinds, and our largest headwind over time has been status quo. And I'm actually quite excited that we're coming into after, you know, seven or eight years of work, we're coming into a time where many of those headwinds are turning into talents.
Chris Hoyd
That is incredible. I don't know how you don't have more gray hair. You've innovated on business model, patient engagement on, you know, literally, I think, clinically on how you've addressed this therapeutic area. Yeah, truly, truly incredible. If if we can for a second, I'm curious that the third one, you mentioned sort of the behavior change, you know, the patient engagement sort of side of it. This is a big issue. I know, for a lot of digital health companies, certainly for a lot of people in product, it's a thing that they, you know, care about and are often accountable for, without getting into anything, too, you know, maybe Virta specific, I suppose, or proprietary. How do you do it? How are you guys so good at? You know, maybe it's building trust and, and educating in the right way? And, you know, whether it's reminders and nudges. How are you guys still good at that?
Amit Shah
You know, I'll provide first one headwind that switched to a tailwind that connects to the last section, which is because the purpose of our engagement is sustainable lifestyle change. We're not engaging for the sake of engaging again, our economic model, in general health care is to engage for the sake of engaging because - that's how you get paid. Our economic model is to engage because we need our patient to do something different. And if they do something different, they will see improvement. And so one of the things that, again, can act as a little bit of a tailwind is we have real world feedback loops - and I'll get to that in a moment, potentially - But therefore, our clinicians can monitor how our patients are doing and we might choose not to reach out to a patient, you know, we might say, hey, look, Chris is doing fine. We are monitoring his biomarkers and we don't we don't need to drive engagement for engagement sake, we will engage with course, if we see one of these two or three things that would cause us to want to engage so that Chris so we can provide the appropriate context content, clinical intervention for Chris to make a sustainable lifestyle change. We don't need engagement as as much of a vanity metric or an economic metric. We truly view and one of the reasons I think patients do enjoy the Virta experience is because, you know, we're in it for their success. I think there are two key assets that enable us to, to deliver engagement or personalized or personalization at scale. The first one is that we have a very unique data set, we've been treating patients for almost a decade, and have, you know, 10s of millions of data points that enable us to use machine learning models to predict what intervention a patient might need next. This data set that we have is based on, again, real world objective feedback loops. So if you're a member with Virta, a patient with Virta, we are asking you to share with us biomarkers, so blood glucose and ketones and weight. You're also interacting with our app and content, and, and your health coach, and other clinicians. And so we use that, that data, we have all of that data, and we're able to then take real world feedback loops and, and predict, you know, what might be helpful to you. Again, there's a layer of clinical judgment and decision making that is involved there. But that, you know, that is a huge accelerant, because again, that's a very unique data set. And because we're trying to drive lifestyle change, we can now start to see what interventions might do that. The second asset that's very distinctive is our clinical content. And our clinicians that really empower our patients. We we provide personalized content, we provide incredible support from very talented clinicians, both health coaches, and providers, doctors and NPS and RNs to empower our patients with an understanding of how their body is responding to changes that they're making near real time. And so this feedback loop reinforces what works and educates patients on what doesn't. And when you're able to do that, again, that's very empowering for the individual. That also just to connect it to another concept that also enables people to be successful in a variety of different environments. I mean, we've got 1000s of patients in every state, across the US in different communities, from different cultures and backgrounds. And, and we've seen success, one of the things we're very proud of and is, is some of the health equity work that we've seen - where we've been able to show similar health and clinical improvements across a variety of different communities that's driven by this - that's driven by ability to personalize at scale, given these these assets.
Chris Hoyd
Very cool. Thanks for sharing that. So I'm curious now to kind of move you back to sort of the Venn diagram between sort of an ops team and kind of product focus in the realm of kind of, you know, a new initiative or product discovery, or as Virta is evolving and scaling. What's the approach? What's the culture around that kind of sort of internal innovation? Like if someone has a, you know, a new approach that they really want to evangelize, or want to test maybe to validate before scaling? How does that get handled? And maybe can you think of a recent example,
Amit Shah
We have seven core values, three of them are ownership, rapid iteration and impact. And so if I put those together, if you if you act like an owner, iterate on solutions, and drive impact, that's it. That's the whole world now. I'm obviously kidding. But I do highlight those core values, because they're - as every company - intentionally chosen. And I think when you put those three together, they speak a lot to innovation, you know, there's a clarity of purpose, which I've already mentioned, so I won't spend too much time on but again, there's a clarity of purpose, regardless of what team you're on, you know, our goal is to is to deliver transformative outcomes and reverse chronic conditions at scale. And so with that clarity of purpose, and then with the structure I described, where individual teams have key performance metrics that they are accountable and responsible for, I think that that helps a lot. So you're driving, you're driving innovation on a in a specific place, as you know, as other product development teams. And when I say product development teams, again, I want to say that it could be expanded. We do this in our operations teams to basically any team at Virta. But they you know, they have two weeks sprints and quarterly planning and all. We also do things like hackathons. But I think the structure that we have found is because we have that structure because you're focused on a problem, and because you're you're able to drive, kind of drive impact in a certain way. We find the drive to innovation to be to be to be really high. So one recent example is we one of the areas that we're that we're highly focused on is the fact that Virta is a big decision, when someone decides to, to onboard a role or could be felt like a big decision, because again, we're driving sustainable lifestyle change, we want you to do some things differently. And so what we've learned, as we've been telling people about Virta, inviting them to join us and come on a journey with us, is that they often need multiple touch points, in order to understand, be educated, decide to make a decision. And so we were thinking about today, most of our touch points are in partnership with a client, you know, driving email, and, you know, but but having that number of touch points over email gets gets difficult. And as you and I and all of our listeners probably know, people get a lot of emails. And so we were exploring ways to try to get more just general awareness about what Virta is, and so a teammate had an idea around the fact that, hey, you know, we've got these pockets, that are very densely populated with Virta members and Virta potential members. And so they wanted to experiment with, with billboards. So over the course of four to six weeks, I think we got highly educated on this teammates are very educated on what it would take to buy billboards, and get billboards and how we might track it, it was pretty hypothesis driven. And you know, as of as of a couple of weeks ago, we have billboards out there, we're tracking some data around it, we're trying to figure out if it's providing the awareness that when paired with an email landing in an inbox is having the impact that we want to have. And that's, you know, that's an example of how we're not afraid to try something, test it, see what the result is, and then scale up or scale down based on that. And then I'll make one small caveat, where there are areas where we do not innovate as much, but we are still trying to push our thinking on it. And those areas, you know, one kind of base thing that we always care a ton about is patient safety. And, you know, kind of the clinical care. And so we do spend a lot of time thinking about innovation in that in that space. And try to make sure that that one is the only reason I mentioned is that one is not a throw it out there and learn and come back that one is a lot more thought through. But it's the same process of hey, you know, then we want to test it at small scale and then build or slow or ramp down based on what we see.
Chris Hoyd
Very cool. Thanks for sharing that example. I love that. So zooming out a little bit again, you mentioned that this looks like it's going to be a big growth year for you guys. Sounds like there may be some tailwinds. Now that you've made it through some of the challenges of the first few years of Virta. And I know, you know, a year of growth and tailwinds is not the story for every digital health company. Right. So I'm curious whether it's the GLP1s or something else. What's what's the current state of Virta? And you know, why are things looking pretty good right now?
Speaker 1
Very grateful that it is a year of tailwinds. I would say the primary reason. By the way, it's too early in the year we're early mid February here. It's too early to call it a year of tailwind. So I'm going to redact that a little bit for our listeners and say, we are experiencing some early tailwinds at, you know, the first reason for that is luck that we've made. And I say we it's the broader Virta team. The team, many of us, myself included, have been here for, you know, 5,6,7,8 years, and have been to all the above comments, you know, publishing papers, working with clients, transforming the lives of 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of people. And so I don't want you know, don't want it to feel like an overnight success story to anyone. You know, we've put a lot of effort into this. You did your question mention one piece of the puzzle that that is that is driving a disproportionate amount of the tailwind. And that is these GLP-1s. And to set context for folks, because GLP-1s, you know, I think most most people and specifically our listeners who might be in health tech, I've heard of them. But if you haven't heard of them, you've more probably heard of their commercial names like Ozempic and Mounjaro, and Wegovy and Zepbound. And these drugs, have, you know, been in the news a lot. And so, so that is a source of tailwind, more context setting, because I think it's helpful and what does that mean for Virta? These drugs have been on the market actually since 2005. And their initial indications that was to treat type two diabetes. And so that means our Virta providers have a lot of experience in prescribing and de-prescribing these drugs for almost a full decade now. And so, the change that we've seen that's driving this tailwind is that these drugs are now approved for weight loss for patients with obesity. If they've expanded the clinical indication, and to use very round numbers, that means they've expanded from being usable for about 10%, 8-10% of the US population to upwards of 50%. And depending on what, you know, BMI, exact BMI you're using could be 60%, or even 70% of the population. And so you would say that wait, if you're the company driving sustainable lifestyle change, why is the fact that these drugs can now be used for that a tailwind? And so there are two reasons for that. First, obesity is more clearly recognized as a disease to be addressed for our clients. And so earlier, our clients were very interested in our type two diabetes results. That is a known chronic condition that drives a lot of cost. And so our clinical impact which I've shared A1C reduction, medication, while reducing medication and weight loss, while reducing medication for that population resulted in great financial impact, you know, savings of between $5,000-$6,000 per patient per year. But for obesity clients are initially were not as it wasn't as expensive. But now, clients are very interested in doing something. The cost of these drugs is about $10,000 per patient per year. Virta can be - and is - a clear and positive alternative to that. The second reason that it's a tailwind is that we've actually seen this approach with type two diabetes before. We can and do use drugs to treat symptoms, but this goes back to what I said earlier, over the last 40 years or 50 years, we've seen an exponential increase in the number of people with type two diabetes, because we're using drugs to treat the symptoms, and you have to be on these drugs for the rest of your life. And so the only way to make a change long term, and sustainable is through addressing the root cause, which is what Virta does nutritionally, we have been an off ramp for people that are on these GLP-1s again, primarily for patients with type two diabetes, but even for those who came to us, you know, on them and were obese, we've we've got data to show that we've sustained 8-10% weight loss after people come off the drugs with our lifestyle change. And so given those two things, this is this is seen as quite a tailwind for us. And because our clinicians have been prescribing a deprescribing for almost a decade. We're also very, very well schooled in when the drugs should be used, you know, I don't want this to come off as like GLP-1s are bad, no, like, there's a lot of clinical indications for which they make a lot of sense. But we are net deprescribers, especially at you know, in the realm of weight loss, because we have the thing that will get people to lose weight and keep it off.
Chris Hoyd
Very cool. That is super exciting. Yeah, hadn't thought about that way. But that's fascinating. And, yeah, probably a good a good position for you guys to be in. Okay, so last question here. Amit, you have, you know, clearly done some incredible work, the way you've scaled the company, the way you've talked about the values, the way you've talked about the team embodying the culture, and the North star. And, you know, many of the outcomes you've achieved, it's, it's a bit mind blowing, and you're clearly an incredible leader. So I want to end with just kind of a question on your leadership style. Can you just tell us a little bit about your leadership style?
Speaker 1
Absolutely. And thank you, Chris, for the positive words, as those who work closely with me know, I'm hopefully a constant student of leadership and always trying to get better. And so in fact, that's probably part of my style, is the desire to improve, kind of constantly. I'll share a few reflections on my leadership style. It's a question that, candidly I struggle with, because I view myself as here for the mission and here to do my part to try to transform as many lives as possible. The first thing that I learned relatively early on and from business school, and my job soon after, is an axiom that, that I love, which is 'people don't care how much you know, until they know how much you care'. And I have found this to be completely true. I'm lucky in the sense that my nature is generally to care about other people. I'm an extrovert. I'm - the other one I am is an F. I'm a I'm a feeler. And so I do care a lot about other people. And while I have a lot of development areas, I think most everyone I work with, will say that they know I care for them as individuals and care really passionately about the work that we're doing at Virta. The second thing that I really believe is that leadership is in the eyes of the lead. Just as as beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, leadership is in the eyes of the lead. You're not a leader because you stood up and appointed anointed yourself, you're a leader because people choose to follow you. And that's a choice. And so when I think about my performance as a leader, I really tried to integrate, you know, objective performance, are we doing the things we said we were going to do metric driven at all, but a lot of subjective feedback, by trying to cast a relatively wide net, annual 360s, and soliciting feedback and being thoughtful about about integrating it. And the only other thing I'll mention on leadership is just the joy of being part of a growth company and a mission driven company. It's given me just a wonderful opportunity to grow myself. One of the most incredible and daunting things has been to lead new functions over time. As I shared in my background, I studied Industrial and Operations, engineering, manufacturing, and then, you know, even my move to health care is very ops focused, and to now have the opportunity to lead a broader set of teams. What I've embraced is a real growth mindset. I'm very honest, and the team will tell you, when I don't know something, I sometimes do ask pretty basic questions as I'm getting up to speed on things. But then, you know, it's paired with a desire to like work like hell and learn really fast. And so I think those are the things I've taken away from the experience and that and just how joyful it can be, to get to work with people that you truly respect, love, and, and are and are driven to do to do something special for the world. So yeah, that's, that's a little bit about how I think about leadership.
Chris Hoyd
Amit, I've really enjoyed chatting with you today. It's been a huge privilege, really, you know, incredible insights that you've shared with, with me in our community today. If anyone does have questions or wants to, you know, chat with you about about something Virta related, how can they reach out to you?
Amit Shah
Yeah, and I'll encourage our listeners, if anybody does have thoughts on any of the things I've mentioned, you know, is interested in interested in talking more about product or, or metabolic health in general, or anything that I that I talked about, please feel free to reach out. My email Amit@Virtahealth.com is how you get me. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Those would be the best ways to reach out and, and certainly also, while you're there, follow Virta and and see what we're up to as we're as we're on this ambitious mission to reverse diabetes and obesity.
Chris Hoyd
Thanks so much for joining us. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn, YouTube, or on our websites, our productinhealthtech.com. If you have ideas or suggestions on what you'd like to hear in a future episode, or if you'd like to be a guest, please just shoot us an email at info@productinhealthtech.com