Good morning! Meta's elimination of fact-checking opens the door to misogynistic speech, Jane Fraser faces a test at Citi, and Fortune’s Alexa Mikhail reports on Thrive Global's innovative partnership in the health care space.
- Healthy habits. Arianna Huffington's Thrive Global aims to help people build healthy habits. Today, the company announced a partnership with a Fortune 500 pharma giant that makes that mission even more accessible.
Huffington tells Fortune exclusively that Eli Lilly will share Thrive's methodology for living healthier through content—healthy recipes, de-stressing videos, and lifestyle recommendations—via its digital health care platform LillyDirect, where people book appointments and request prescriptions.
“It's a very different playbook than pharma has used so far, and indeed, than the health care industry has focused on,” says Huffington. With a nod to the popularity of diabetes and weight management drugs known as GLP-1s, she hopes that expanding the platform elevates the importance of utilizing medicine alongside lifestyle changes. “Although we've known about the science of behaviors for a while, they haven't really been embedded in the life of the patient, in conjunction with medicine.”
For Eli Lilly, the nearly $41 billion-in-revenue company that makes the weight loss injectable Zepbound, the partnership is an effort to "put holistic health above all," says global chief customer officer and group vice president Jen Oleksiw.
In the U.S., nearly 130 million adults live with at least one major chronic condition, like heart disease or diabetes. Chronic conditions account for the majority of the nation’s $4.5 trillion yearly health care expenditures. Extensive research shows that healthy lifestyle habits, such as getting enough quality sleep and moving daily, are critical for longevity and for managing and staving off chronic diseases, which are the leading causes of sickness, disability, and death in the U.S.
Last year, Thrive Global teamed up with OpenAI to create Thrive AI Health, an AI-powered health coach trained on the company’s behavior-change research and customers’ self-reported health data to provide real-time lifestyle recommendations on sleep, exercise, diet, and social connectedness.
Eli Lilly and Company also just announced their investment in the AI branch of Thrive, alongside original funders, the OpenAI Startup Fund and the Alice L. Walton Foundation.
The partnership presents a shake-up to traditional health care delivery, and faces the challenges of overcoming patient hesitancy and lack of trust. Still, Huffington says, “This is a transformational moment.”
Alexa Mikhail
alexa.mikhail@fortune.com
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