Sean Duffy

Sean Duffy has a pretty simple premise for his business: Technology can actually be prescriptive rather than retrospective. As he put it to Fortune in 2018: “It’s not about the data itself, it’s how you use it. The types of data that are going to be most useful going forward [are] the ‘in between’ data—what happens between actual health care visits.”

Duffy’s digital-health firm, Omada Health, deploys a system of connected online coaches to help patients monitor and treat conditions like diabetes and cardiovascular diseases with the aid of remote devices that can beam over data to these experts. Omada’s rise began in earnest in 2016, when it became one of the first telemedicine firms to convince the federal government that its technology was worthy of Medicaid reimbursements because it actually improved health outcomes.

Since then, Omada Health has expanded its scope to treat other conditions, including depression. In Duffy’s view, all of these chronic conditions are interconnected and can exacerbate each other—which, in turn, multiplies the benefits of gathering and using data about them.