For decades, Elina Onitskansky said she struggled with her weight, even as she tried an array of purported solutions to no avail.
“If there’s a diet, weight loss, spa, fitness trend, or other solution someone has thought of in the last 30 years, I can almost guarantee I’ve done it,” she told Healthcare Brew.
After giving up on counting calories, the physicist turned healthcare executive sought out obesity treatment and bariatric surgery—an experience she said inspired her to help others struggling with weight loss.
Onitskansky leveraged her past experience as Molina Healthcare’s SVP of health and strategy to found Ilant Health, which partners with Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers to provide an affordable, value-based approach to obesity care. The startup publicly launched on October 17 after generating $3 million in funding.
Ilant’s entrance into the market comes amid a larger focus on comprehensive approaches to obesity care, sparked in part by new and expensive injectable weight loss drugs.
The company promotes everything from intensive behavioral therapy to pharmacotherapy—including GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic—to bariatric surgery. Onitskansky, Ilant’s CEO, said the comprehensive offerings are part of the company’s goal to become a “single front door for obesity treatment.”
“Our focus is: How do we match each individual to the right solution?” she said.
The comprehensive approach, Onitskansky added, is also attractive to employers that want to provide obesity coverage but may have “point solution fatigue,” or weariness due to having too many programs built to solve just one problem.
“When you start on the Ilant program, you’re paired with a provider, you’re paired with a peer navigator, you’re paired with a nutritionist or a dietician, you’re paired with a mental health professional—those people stay with you throughout the journey,” she said.
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With obesity affecting more than 100 million people living in the US—including nearly 42% of adults and 20% of children—and accounting for about $147 billion in health costs each year according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a growing number of companies have entered the obesity treatment market in recent years. Even legacy weight loss giants like Weight Watchers have turned their attention to the clinical space, particularly as the demand for new injectable medications continues to increase.
Ilant, which employs providers and peer navigators in all 50 states, collects information on a patient’s medical situation, nutrition, mental health, family support, and prior experience with weight loss as part of the initial intake.
It further aggregates patient information from medical and pharmacy records and uses an algorithm known as Ilant Metabolism Matters to suggest care pathways. These pathways typically span about two years and are based on medical and behavioral health considerations, as well as social determinants of health. It’s part of Ilant’s effort to ensure a patient’s first interaction with a provider is “an incredibly high-quality, impactful event,” Onitskansky said.
She added that although Ilant does use telehealth capabilities, the program focuses on human-to-human interactions. And to ensure the program focuses on value, Ilant’s pricing is based on patient outcomes and engagement.
“What does it mean to be value-based? I think a lot of times people throw out the term ‘value-based care.’ To us, it means you really have to be on the hook for outcomes, and outcomes around quality, outcomes around cost,” Onitskansky said. “We’ve aligned our payment structure around that.”