ŌURA: Improving Patient Outcomes Through Wearable Technology with Jason Oberfest, Vice President of Health Partnerships at ŌURA

[00:00:01] This podcast is produced by Outcomes Rocket, your healthcare exclusive digital marketing agency. Outcomes Rocket exists to help healthcare organizations like yours to maximize their impact and accelerate growth. Visit outcomesrocket.com or text us at 312-224-9945.

[00:00:25] Hello everyone and welcome back to the Beat Podcast recorded live at Vive in Nashville, Tennessee. So excited to have Jason Oberfest with us. He is the Vice President of Health Partnerships at ŌURA, where he oversees healthcare strategy and partnerships. He's working with a mix of health plans, hospital systems and virtual care providers to make a difference in health. Jason, welcome.

[00:01:01] Thank you. Great to be here. It's a pleasure to have you here. I've heard a lot about ŌURA. There's so many testimonials about the ring, but I don't have one. So I'd love for you to tell me more about it. Sure. I'd be happy to. So ŌURA is a health technology company. The company has been around for quite some time. 2013 was the originating year. A few things very unique about ŌURA, I think in the wearable space.

[00:01:25] There's very strong focus on sleep from the beginning, which I think is increasingly being understood by the healthcare community as important for many pillars of health, not just the obvious ones like mental health. We all know what a bad night of sleep can do to your outlook for the day. But increasingly areas like cardiovascular health, metabolic health and many other areas as well.

[00:01:46] So that's a big differentiator of ŌURA. You wear it on your finger. So that's very unique as well. It's a ring form factor really designed just to disappear in the background. And the finger is a very accurate place to sample biometric data from. So there's real benefits there. And I think increasingly also many people appreciate not having a screen necessarily, another screen in their lives, but they want to be tracking this information.

[00:02:11] So the ring is really just designed to disappear in the background. It can run six, seven or more days between charges also, which is really beneficial. Yeah, that's how it works. What's also quite unique about it is the app experience as well. ŌURA is a very unique experience for wearables, I think. It's not just about presenting data and information about sleep and activity and many other areas I'm sure we'll talk about, but there's a lot of context always put around that information as well.

[00:02:37] So support, coaching, encouragement, it's very unique to the ŌURA experience. Well, I think that's fascinating. And thanks for sharing the history and a little bit more about how it works. So what would you say is the key way that the organization helps drive change? It's a good question. ŌURA by nature of what we've done has always been very adjacent to healthcare for some time, focusing on sleep and helping people move more throughout the day and things like that.

[00:03:06] ŌURA we have a belief, though, that to really be significant in improving lives, we need to work very closely with healthcare. So a lot of what I've been focused on is figuring out the right partnerships there. What are the clinical use cases that are most valuable to the community, whether it's payers, providers, really anyone across the healthcare ecosystem? And how can we connect in to support those programs? So that's really been, I think for us, the big focus over the last year or so since I've been at the company.

[00:03:35] Yeah, that's exciting and very important work. What would you say is the potential for wearable health trackers like the Oura Ring in traditional healthcare settings? And how might their integration with providers, health systems like you mentioned, impact the patient experience? Yeah, it's a good question. I'll give you one example. An area that we've been really thinking a lot about is primary care.

[00:03:57] So primary care, depending on what data sources you look at, it represents a really small percent of healthcare spend overall, maybe 2% to 6%. But it's very easy to attribute a large percent of the downstream expense of healthcare to lack of adequate primary care. So for us, that's a really important area. And we think technology has a really big role to play in improving primary care. Anyone involved in healthcare knows there's a staffing challenge right now.

[00:04:27] There are way more patients than there are our care teams. And technology can really play a significant role, we think, in making primary care more efficient. And that's a big part of what we're focused on right now. We're doing a lot of work in the Medicare Advantage space as an example of that, which does tend to focus more on primary care. And we just think it's a really important area. Yeah, and I would agree as well. And we've got chronic care management. We've got remote patient monitoring.

[00:04:55] All these things are tools that are essential for ongoing care. And I believe that's the function, right, of Oro. So what are you reading with the ring? What metrics can you use? Yeah, so the ring measures a wide variety of biometric information. The platform was originally developed on three principles of what we call sleep and readiness and activity.

[00:05:18] So sleep looks at sleep staging, sleep efficiency, sleep latency, many aspects of sleep. Activity, of course, is the measurement of heart rate activity. And we are getting better and better at doing that automatically so we can sense types of activity and record that for the end user in a way that makes it just much more convenient. And readiness is different. It's a combination of the two.

[00:05:46] It's informed by sleep and activity, but it looks at other factors as well. So things like heart rate variability, resting heart rate overnight, body temperature all can play a really significant role in the calculation of readiness. We do a lot in many other areas, too. We've been very active in women's health for quite a long time. At this point across really the entire women's health journey from trying to conceive, contraception support.

[00:06:13] We have a partnership with a company called Natural Cycles we're really proud of. It creates a really good experience for consumers between seamless tracking with aura and having natural options for contraception. So that's another area. All the way through pregnancy insights into even perimenopause and menopause support for women. That's awesome. So that's a big area for us generally, women's health. And heart health is a big important area as well.

[00:06:39] We have a variety of measures that we track ranging from VO2 max, which is increasingly being used in mainstream care, not just for elite athletes. And a feature we call cardiovascular age, which is a very good estimation of exactly what it sounds like a person's cardiovascular age. It's a highly trainable measure. So you can take very clear steps to improve that through activity and other means. That's fantastic.

[00:07:06] Congratulations on all of those markets that you serve and the difference that you guys are making. At Vive, we talk about a lot of technology, a lot of trends. What technology and trends do you see are going to have the biggest impact in health care? I think a big trend that we're really excited about and we're involved in it, so that might be part of why, is just the ability for these tools, these wearable devices to track more and more biometric information and to do so more accurately.

[00:07:36] So something that a lot of people don't realize about Aura because we're so known for being a very innovative consumer company. But from the start of the company, there was a very strong emphasis around science and accuracy. We have a large team, I think over 25 PhDs on staff now that are really primarily focused on validating the accuracy of what we measure. And that's only continuing to grow. So there are more and more types of data that we're able to measure through the sensors on the device.

[00:08:06] And we can do that in a very seamless way in the background, which is really critical because people don't mind wearing rings generally. So I think that's going to be a huge continued evolution in the industry. The ability to track more and more information accurately, and then the ability to fold that into care plans, which is really a big part of what I'm focused on right now. How do we take our data and make it useful and actionable to a care team in their standard delivery of care? That's a huge focus of ours right now. That's beautiful.

[00:08:36] Yeah. And so we saw that Aura recently announced a partnership with Essence Healthcare. Yes, that's right. Medicare Advantage health plans. Could you talk a little bit about this partnership and how wearables like Aura Ring benefit today? Yeah, that's a good question. I would say the partnership started with a shared vision for what I was describing briefly earlier, which is a belief in the importance of primary care. That really is what brought us together initially.

[00:09:04] The other thing about Essence from our perspective is I think there are a lot of entities in healthcare that are experts in value-based care and care delivery the way Essence is, but aren't always really steeped in technology. Essence has a very strong platform for integrating third party data. And so for us, that wasn't even a difficult conversation the way it often is with healthcare entities.

[00:09:29] They just knew exactly how to grab the data and we could focus on what mattered, which was the member experience, the clinical use cases they wanted to build. And so they were a really good partner from that perspective. And yeah, the way the program works is if you sign up for select Essence plans, you can opt to receive an Aura Ring at no cost and then opt to connect your data to your care teams for more informed conversations with your physicians or other care staff.

[00:09:58] It makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. I think more partnerships like these should be happening. I think it makes so much sense. And so when you think about the business, what would you say is the biggest pain point? Like an organization like Essence? Well, yours, like Aura. Our goal overall with healthcare is, as I was saying earlier, I think part of it is our mission is just to improve the quality of people's lives and to help people live healthier lives.

[00:10:24] And there's no doubt that a huge part of fulfilling that goal is to integrate with care plans. So we have to do that. And a lot of our work involves that. The other side of it, I would say that I'm really excited about personally, and I know many at our company are excited about is if we build those programs correctly, we're also making our technology more accessible to more people. Many people still may not have heard of Aura. They may have heard of it, but considered it out of reach financially.

[00:10:53] And when we begin to prove clinical evidence as we're doing and we're included into care protocols, we're able to actually get the technology to more people to help more people. And so for me, that's super exciting and gratifying. Yeah, that's very exciting. That's very exciting. So looking forward to the rest of 2025, where does Aura plan to go next? And does Aura plan to pursue partnerships with other payer and provider organizations? Yeah, for sure.

[00:11:21] Obviously, without commenting on things that we haven't announced yet, I think we're seeing a lot of demand from payers and not just in the MA space. You know, the good question you asked about our work there, but across the board on the payer side, we're certainly seeing a lot of interest there. I think we'll continue to see more interest on the provider side as well. And I think that's true with both more traditional provider organizations. We've seen a huge surge in concierge medicine organizations, for lack of a better term.

[00:11:51] I think more and more consumers are interested in paying out of pocket for a higher standard of primary care. They're reading authors like Peter Atiyah. They're listening to all the podcasts and realizing that tracking their information can be a really important part of their long term goals and goal setting. And so we're seeing a lot of growth there.

[00:12:11] And then, of course, we're also seeing a lot of growth in the upcoming virtual care startups across like the spectrum, whether it's mental health or women's health or even metabolic health or cardiovascular health as well. So we're seeing a lot demand in all those areas. That's super exciting. And with a form factor like a ring and the ability to track accurately, I definitely see why. So congratulations on the progress. Thank you.

[00:12:38] So, look, this has been an incredible conversation, Jason. I'd love to just give you an opportunity to give the listeners a call to action and then the best place that they could reach out to you and the Aura team to explore partnerships. That is a great question. I think our website is always a great place to go. Our team's really good about cataloging the work we're doing in health care. There's a lot of information there also around our device accuracy, which, as I mentioned, we're very focused on.

[00:13:05] We've done a lot of research and there's a lot of third party research supporting that. So I would encourage anyone to go there. And there's always ways to reach us there if you're ever interested in talking more about health care initiatives. I love it. Well, there you go, folks. Make sure you check out the show notes. We'll include the ways to get in touch with Aura, their website and all of the health care focused programs. Again, just an incredible opportunity to connect with Jason Oberfest, vice president of health care partnerships at Aura. Take advantage of the opportunity to connect with him.

[00:13:35] That's how change happens. And Jason, thanks for being with us. This podcast is produced by Outcomes Rocket, your health care exclusive digital marketing agency.

[00:13:59] Outcomes Rocket exists to help health care organizations like yours to maximize their impact and accelerate growth. Visit outcomesrocket.com or text us at 312-224-9945.