Program developed by Stanford, and initially offered through collaboration between Arthritis Foundation, NCOA and CDC, now available for broad implementation through Canary Health
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 24, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Canary Health, a transformative healthcare company that provides evidence-based, digital self-management programs which arrest the progression of chronic diseases, today announced it has received support to broadly implement an effective self-management program for the 53 million people living with arthritis in the United States. The program, Better Choices, Better Health, will receive funding from the Arthritis Foundation by way of their cooperative agreement with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and will be administered by Canary Health through health plans and providers across the country.
The arthritis self-management program, developed by Dr. Kate Lorig and her team at Stanford Education Research Center, is a 6-week, peer-led small-group workshop that helps individuals effectively manage their disease. The online program first launched in 2004 and was subsequently tested through a randomized, controlled trial. The results of the trial, published in a 2008 issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism, showed clinically and statistically significant impacts at both six and 12 months, including reduced pain, decreased activity limitations, increased self-efficacy to manage arthritis and reduced health distress. In 2011, the Arthritis Foundation, which designed the registration process and recruited participants, supported the rollout of the program in collaboration with the National Council on Aging (NCOA) to more than 2,000 consumers to demonstrate its impact beyond the research setting. In the final year of this effort, Canary Health took over the exclusive license for the program and is committed to scaling the program and ensuring its sustainability. The financial support will help ensure rapid adoption of the program and offset costs for health plans and providers who want to offer it to their participants. Better Choices, Better Health is one of several effective programs that CDC categorizes as promising for adults with arthritis.
"The Arthritis Self-Management Program has been shown to reduce pain and increase mobility for people with arthritis. It has been beneficial to more than a million people worldwide," said Kate Lorig DrPH, Director of the Stanford Patient Education Research Center. "We are grateful that Canary Health has developed an effective way to deliver digital health programs like Better Choices, Better Health to a larger number of people."
"Canary Health has created several evidence-based, digital self-management programs for a variety of chronic diseases that have significantly improved health and business outcomes," said Adam Kaufman PhD, president and CEO of Canary Health. "We are honored to be able to broadly scale and implement this proven arthritis self-management program, and help people with arthritis start living, healthier."
More than 80 million people in the U.S. suffer from one or more chronic diseases – many of which have compounding effects which are preventable. This translates into a dramatically lower quality of life for individuals and more than $200 billion in preventable healthcare costs. Canary Health's mission is to provide evidence-based, digital self-management programs that make a significant impact in preventing, and arresting, the progression of chronic diseases such as diabetes, arthritis, heart disease and depression, and reduce the cost of care. According to the CDC, self-management education classes help people learn techniques to reduce pain and improve function and to develop skills and confidence to manage arthritis and other conditions daily. Participants in self-management programs like Better Choices, Better Health have also been shown to have fewer visits to physicians and emergency departments, fewer days in the hospital and fewer hospitalizations. In addition to improving the overall quality of life for our participants, Canary Health has proven and published outcomes for its self-management programs, including lowering the rate of new diabetes cases by 80%, musculoskeletal cases by 65%, and significantly improved symptoms in 47% of our participants suffering from depression. Our health plan partners report a 90% user satisfaction rate and a savings as high as $1,000 per participant per year for an overall ROI of 3:1.
For more information about Better Choices, Better Health – Arthritis, please email [email protected].
About Canary Health
Canary Health (www.canaryhealth.com) is a transformative healthcare company that provides evidence-based, digital self-management programs which arrest the progression of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, arthritis and depression. With deep experience in care management, public health, empathic design, health economics, data science and mobile technology, Canary Health's interdisciplinary team of practitioners help health plans and providers address the needs of their populations, implement engaging and scalable digital health programs and significantly improve business and health outcomes. Based in Los Angeles, Canary Health (formerly DPS Health) was founded in 2015 and currently operates digital self-management programs for a variety of health plans in collaboration with partners such as CDC.
**The project described in this press release was supported by Cooperative Agreement DP003806 from CDC. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of CDC.**
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