(NEW YORK)–Fruit Street Health, a digital health and telehealth startup focused on delivering the CDC’s Diabetes Prevention Program and other chronic disease prevention programs, announced it has raised an additional $3 million since its last funding round a year ago on June 1st, 2016.
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This additional equity raise now brings Fruit Street’s total funding to $8.4 million, which brings the total number of physicians who have invested in Fruit Street to over 200. The lead investor was Dr. Jeremy Tucker who is a senior emergency medicine physician on the board of directors of Fruit Street.
Fruit Street’s digital health platform enables healthcare providers such as physicians and registered dietitians to conduct HIPAA compliant video consultations with their patients and also monitor their health, diet, and lifestyle using medical devices, wearable devices, and the Fruit Street mobile application for dietary tracking. Devices such as wireless scales, Fitbit trackers, blood pressure cuffs, and glucometers are integrated into the platform. The Fruit Street “Instagram style” mobile app encourages patients to take photos of their food which are transmitted to their dietitians for feedback.
Fruit Street licenses its digital health platform to healthcare providers, but also uses its digital health platform to deliver the Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) to commercial health plan members using its own staff of registered dietitians. The National DPP is an evidence-based lifestyle change program which has been demonstrated to delay or prevent the development of type 2 diabetes among people at high risk.
The DPP, conducted by the Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group, was a major multicenter clinical research study published in 2002 with 3,234 participants who were overweight and had prediabetes, aimed at discovering whether modest weight loss through dietary changes and increased physical activity or treatment with the oral diabetes drug metformin (Glucophase) was more effective at preventing or delaying type 2 diabetes. The DPP showed that people at risk for developing diabetes can prevent or delay the onset of diabetes by losing a modest amount of weight through diet and exercise. DPP participants in the lifestyle intervention group reduced their risk of developing diabetes by 58 percent during the study. Lifestyle changes worked particularly well for participants aged 60 and older, reducing their risk by 71 percent. Participants taking metformin reduced their risk of developing diabetes by 31 percent which was less dramatic than the lifestyle modification group. The researchers published their findings in the February 7, 2002, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (“Reduction in the Incidence of Type 2 Diabetes with Lifestyle Intervention or Metformin”).
Fruit Street has raised this additional capital to fund additional software development through its joint venture agreement with VSee.com, and to hire more dietitians to deliver the diabetes prevention program to commercial health plans.
About Fruit Street
Fruit Street is a telemedicine software product that is licensed to healthcare professionals which allows them to conduct HIPAA compliant video consultations with their patients and monitor their patients’ health, diet, and lifestyle using medical and wearable devices. http://www.fruitstreet.com