Dissuade the GLP-curious and educate the GLP-serious.
Say that three times fast, because that’s the key to affordable coverage of weight control drugs.
Here’s why: the majority of users discontinue the drugs within 6 months and almost two-thirds within 10 months. Those users consume a big chunk of your weight loss drug budget with nothing to show for it. Here are the stats, from the Blue Cross Association and Reuters:
Most of these likely GLP-curious dropouts got their information from influencers or TV. Both "sources" are long on hype and short on clinical information. Influencers aren’t required to disclose anything, while TV ads for drugs devote about 5 concluding seconds to a required recitation of warnings, delivered faster than a Gilbert & Sullivan patter song.
But what if you require employees to complete a quiz in which they must actually learn something about the drugs before you pay for them? Wouldn't many if not most of those 64% decide to pass on the drugs in the first place?
If the drugs cost (post-rebate) $800/month before people drop out, and a single inexpensive quiz can discourage unserious use in the first place, would you even need an actuary to calculate the ROI?
The next section answers all these questions.
The Quizzify Solution (I): Dissuade the GLP-Curious
Quizzify's Before Your Journey quiz covers 27 things that people need to know about these drugs before they start on them. Examples: side effects, potential nutritional deficiencies, weight regain rates, long-term potential hazards like cancer and blindness (yes, blindness), and our two personal favorites, which follow.
First, if you’re male – unless you are really serious about improving your health – do you even go to the next question after this one? Note that (as we say in the click-through answer) losing weight does improve performance. (And, frankly, your odds of getting laid, to use a technical clinical term. This is not mentioned in the curriculum but presumably men would intuit.) Just not by using the drugs.
Second, if you’re female – unless you are really serious about improving your health – do you even go to the next question after this one? (Note that the answer is that Ozempic does not itself cause Ozempic face. And yet, in the immortal words of the great philosopher Rod Stewart, every picture tells a story, don't it?)
For Quizzify Classic, the traditional monthly health-and-healthcare quizzes, we pride ourselves on our high quiz completion rate. For our “Dissuade the GLP-Curious” initial quiz, we pride ourselves on our low quiz completion rate.
We are so certain that GLP-curious people who start this quiz won’t complete it – or if they do complete it won’t start the drugs – that you only pay Quizzify when our education dissuades someone from starting a GLP-1.
So ROI-wise, you cannot lose. People whom you wouldn't want to finance anyway, drop out.
On the other hand, the people who do start the drugs after understanding and accepting the likelihood of the side effects and long-term hazards are exactly the ones you would want to finance – and that brings us to the next section.
The Quizzify Solution (II): Educate the GLP-Serious
A small percentage of people who start the quiz will finish the quiz and start the drugs. Those are the ones who are really serious about improving their health and hence most likely to be successful. You want to help them on their journey. So the next quiz is on managing digestive complications. Heartburn is among the most common, and is often treated on an ongoing basis with drugs whose own labels caution against ongoing use.
After that, you can see the modules that follow Before Your Journey and Digestive Complications. (Nutrition consists of five modules. Hence the total of 14.).
Speaking of nutrition, as you can see here, we name brands. People shop for brands, not concepts. The correct but clichéd advice to “avoid added sugar” cliché is, ironically, saccharine.
Speaking of serious, here’s how serious we are: as mentioned, we charge only for those who continue from the quiz to the drugs. Those who do continue get access to the entire GLP-Serious curriculum at no cost to you. So this is better than a 100% guarantee. That’s how certain we are that most people will drop out, and that those who continue will be the most committed.
How does this work with prior authorization (PA)?
The Before Your Journey quiz can replace or complement traditional PA. The remainder of the curriculum can replace or complement continuing authorization because if you're taking $1000/month for someone to lose weight, the least they can do is spend 10 minutes a month learnig how to keep it off.
The problem with applying conventional PA for weight loss drug approval is that the system is easily gamed. Patients with the average American BMI (29) can gain a few pounds to reach the authorizable threshold BMI (30). They did this in the old days of wellness, so that they could get paid (or avoid a fine) for then losing the weight. This 2016 blog post on cheating in corporate weight loss competitions has garnered 100,000 views…and even today, every January brings hundreds more.
Doctors are getting in on the action too. Elevance (nee Anthem) has tried to crack down on off-label prescribing of Ozempic, which they say “is at an all-time high.”
Bottom line: PA on its own does not work for these drugs. Quizzify's "self-authorization" does. Depending on your budget for these drugs, you can require completion of the quiz, passing of the quiz with (for example) a 70% score, passing with a higher score, and so on. In case of failing, you can space the interval for retesting at one hour, one day, one week etc.
How to implement Quizzify
A truly transparent PBM that has committed to reducing your drug costs should be happy to incorporate Quizzify into their mix. (They may charge a small and fully disclosed admin fee for the slight amount of extra work.) Several have already signed up with us. Contact us for an up-to-date list.
If you are still using one of the Big Three, you’ll be blocked because they would lose their share of the rebates. (While inconvenient and costly for you, we must admit that being blocked due to our effectiveness is flattering…)
In that case, you have three other options:
If you have a precedent for giving employees a more favorable deal if they use your navigator, then do it here too. The navigator would then assign the quiz.
You can have your wellness vendor or diabetes vendor (Virta, TwinHealth, USPM or Aduro are primed) administer it.
You can simply reallocate your own incentive program so that people have the incentive to play the quiz on these drugs.
In the case of the last, consider a couple of things. First, since it's not required, some people will pass on the quiz and go directly to the drugs. There will also be people who have no interest in or indication for the drugs, but who want their $100. (Since you offer a menu of incentive options, they would probably find another way to earn the $100, meaning there is zero incremental cost to you if they take this quiz.)
However, a large chunk of people interested in the drug will take the quiz. No PBM can block this. Further, education on diet and exercise is right on the label of these drugs. Encouraging off-label use (meaning punting to the PBM without educating employees) may even be a violation of your fiduciary responsibility.
Where do we go from here?
Well, we just made you an offer you can't refuse. A hand-in-glove solution to your #1 out-of-control drugspend, the only drugspend that is mostly mitigatable by employee education, which we are the industry leaders in. We uniquely segment your population into the Curious vs. the Serious, tailoring solutions for each. We've priced it so that there is zero downside, with an intuitively immediate and high ROI on the upside.
Just schedule a Calendly and we'll go from there.
