Dr. Byron Crowe, Solera Health: Offering Hypertension Management Solutions

Solera Health, a leading platform for connecting people to personalized health solutions, recently partnered with DarioHealth, a digital therapeutics company focused on optimizing the management of chronic conditions via its user-centric platform. Together, Solera and Dario are offering turnkey, state-of-the-art solutions for treating hypertension, which is arguably the biggest health problem plaguing Americans.

DocWire News spoke with Byron Crowe, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Solera Health, about combatting hypertension through the partnership with Dario.

DocWire News: Can you give us some professional background on yourself?

Dr. Byron Crowe: Yeah, Rob, of course. So my name’s Byron Crow. I’m a physician here in Boston, practicing clinically at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. And I serve on the faculty at Harvard Medical School. I’m currently the Chief Medical Officer at Solera Health, where I have responsibility across our suite of physical social and mental health solutions.

Talk to us about Solera Health and its mission.

Solera Health is a platform and network curator that brings together cutting edge solutions in digital and community health to address the most common and pressing needs in physical, social and mental health for populations.

How big a problem is hypertension in America?

Rob, hypertension is an enormous issue affecting the country. Almost half of Americans, adults, have hypertension. And about one in four are under control. And so we have not only tens of millions of individuals who have this condition, but hypertension contributes significantly to heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in America.

So if you think about individuals who have high blood pressure, they’re at much higher risk for strokes, heart attacks, heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and yet so many folks are going unmanaged. It really is an opportunity to improve substantially our ability to deliver this really needed care.

What is Solera doing to address hypertension?

At Solera, we bring together curated networks of digital and community health solutions. And within those networks, we organize by condition category. So that includes our cardio metabolic continuum, along with mental health and musculoskeletal care. In our cardio metabolic continuum, we’ve been doing for years intensive lifestyle change to achieve weight loss and do that through helping folks increase the amount of physical activity they get, and making important changes to their diet.

And that is the foundation of chronic disease management, in the cardio metabolic world. We need folks to eat better and we need folks to get more physical activity. That’s one important part of the story. Now the cardio metabolic continuum is long, and lifestyle change is one key part, but there’s a few other components too, in particular understanding and monitoring things like your blood pressure. If you have diabetes, things like your blood glucose. And then addressing any kind of complications from those conditions.

So what Solera is doing is building out that whole cardio metabolic continuum and our hypertension solution and partnership with Dario is a key part of that.

Talk to us about Solera’s partnership with DarioHealth, and its importance.

Yes, so the Solera partnership with Dario is a key part of our strategy to really get a handle on chronic disease management among the populations that we serve, which are members of health plans across the country. And by partnering with Dario, we fill an important need and we expand the Solera continuum from the foundational lifestyle change, now through a coached experience for individuals where high blood pressure really is their most pressing immediate health goal.

And using the Dario program, they can engage with a coach, engage with intensive home blood pressure monitoring to understand the drivers of their high blood pressure, and get it under control in a way that is a really nice combination of lifestyle change and higher intensity of monitoring and coaching.

What’s in the pipeline for Solera Health in 2022?

The Solera pipeline has grown substantially in the last two years. We have a really amazing mental health and musculoskeletal care network. In addition, we’re continuing to expand our cardio metabolic platform, in particular with Dario, but there are several other exciting program providers that are in our pipeline. And then we’ve announced the formation of our gut health program. And then we have several new condition categories that we’ll be announcing in the second half of this year.

Any closing thoughts?

As we think about the importance of hypertension management, when hypertension is often referred to as the silent killer, it just looks like a number on a monitor somewhere. And yet over years and years, when it’s not controlled, it leads to really debilitating health conditions from heart attacks and strokes thinks that that change people’s lives. And I’m really excited about this hypertension solution, because it has the potential to, and Dario has demonstrated amazing results, in lowering blood pressure. In their most recent most presentation at the American Diabetes Association, they found that in a cohort of over 2,500 patients, two thirds improve their blood pressure by an average of 13 points on their systolic blood pressure, and 38.7% reduce their blood pressure to a lower stage.

And those are tremendous results. If we can do that at scale, we’re making a huge impact in reducing cardiovascular disease in the United States, and that’s a incredible benefit to individuals and populations. So it’s a really exciting opportunity to use digital health to scale really needed health supports.