Food as medicine platform Heali is now enrolled in fee-for-service Medicaid in California and has launched its medical nutrition therapy tool, the startup exclusively told MedCity News.
Los Angeles-based Heali launched in November and offers an AI-powered app that provides personalized nutrition plans for more than 200 chronic conditions, including prediabetes, obesity, heart disease, Crohn’s disease and mental health. These plans take into account the user’s goals, preferences, weight, activity level and dietary restrictions.
Heali’s contract with Medicaid in California is the first public health partnership. On the commercial side, the company is also contracted with Blue Shield of California and works with several provider organizations, including Boston Heart Diagnostics. According to Kyle Dardashti, founder and CEO of Heali, the company wants to work with more Medicaid programs in the future.
“The government public sector recognizes the value of medical nutritional therapy, not only because it has such profound effects on metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes or even prediabetes, but because it reaches much further,” Dardashti said in an interview. “They now reimburse costs for conditions ranging from gastrointestinal diseases such as Crohn’s disease or irritable bowel syndrome to neurological diseases. These conditions have traditionally never been covered by the public payer system in the past.”
Heali also introduced its Medical Nutrition Therapy tool, available in its app, which gives patients and providers access to a library of evidence-based nutritional recommendations categorized by medical condition. The company has conducted systematic research on 239 medical conditions and collected research on evidence-based nutritional protocols for these conditions. Users can select one or more medical conditions and then view all effective nutritional protocols for the medical conditions. You can also check the research yourself.
“It is extremely valuable for providers who treat multiple different disease states or for patients who may be polychronic and have different medical conditions [the provider] is not a specialist,” said Dardashti. “Secondly, [it’s valuable] so that the patient can see it for themselves and then have the means to follow those nutritional recommendations.”
The tool was previously only available for internal use by Heali nutritionists. It is now available to any patient or provider through the Heali app. It will be offered free for a limited time, but there will be a paywall in the near future, Dardashti said.
He added that Heali wants to prove that food can be a powerful tool to prevent, treat and manage disease.
“The way we do this is by taking a leadership role in research, ensuring that the diets we recommend to patients are evidence-based, and by gaining the trust of patients by providing them with these “Make research accessible,” explained Dardashti.
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