Oviva

Hypertension isn't just the world's most common chronic disease. It's the leading risk factor for premature death and in Germany alone, it combines with obesity to drive over €100 billion in annual healthcare and productivity costs. At the same time, there is a real treatment gap: nearly 1 in 3 adults in Europe live with high blood pressure, and half of those diagnosed remain uncontrolled, despite available pharmacotherapy. The missing layer is structured lifestyle support, and it's the layer most healthcare systems struggle to deliver at scale. For World Hypertension Day, our mission at Oviva is to close this gap. In our new German GP survey, 3 in 4 doctors confirmed what we've seen for years: there is a (very) large need for additional lifestyle support for hypertension patients. That's exactly what we built. Oviva Direkt Bluthochdruck, the first dual-effect digital therapeutic reimbursed by Germany's statutory health system, delivered -11 mmHg systolic BP and -4% body weight after 3 months in the randomised HYPE trial. The same therapy that lowers blood pressure also addresses obesity, the most common comorbidity. Real savings for payers. Real productivity gains for the economy.

More than 20 million Germans live with hypertension. ~7 million of them also live with obesity. And half of all diagnosed patients remain uncontrolled despite available medication. Two of the costliest chronic diseases in our healthcare system, sharing the same patients, yet still treated in silos. As we mark World Hypertension Day, our mission at Oviva is clear: integrating structured lifestyle intervention into the standard hypertension pathway. In our new survey of 400 German practising physicians, 3 in 4 confirmed a (very) large need for exactly this kind of support. We have the evidence. With Oviva Direkt Bluthochdruck, Germany's first dual-effect Digital Therapeutic (DiGA), reimbursed by all statutory health insurers - the randomised HYPE trial showed -11 mmHg systolic BP and -4.14% body weight after 3 months. One therapy, two of Germany's biggest cost drivers addressed. Let's make this the standard, not the exception.

Half of all patients diagnosed with high blood pressure are still not at target, even with medication. For World Hypertension Day, that gap is what drives our mission at Oviva . Behind every uncontrolled reading is a person at higher risk of stroke, heart attack, and kidney disease and a system carrying the cost of preventable complications. Hypertension is the leading risk factor for premature death globally, yet structured lifestyle support is still missing from most care pathways. The doctors agree. In our new German GP survey, 3 in 4 confirmed a (very) large need for additional lifestyle support for their hypertension patients. This is where digital therapy changes the picture. In Germany, we've launched Oviva Direkt Bluthochdruck earlier this year, tthe first dual-effect Digital Therapeutic, validated in the randomised HYPE trial: -11 mmHg systolic BP & -4.14% body weight after 3 months. The same model can scale across Europe. High-quality, integrated care shouldn't be a luxury. It must become the standard for everyone.

💫 What a week. At the European Congress on Obesity in Istanbul, I presented our team's findings from 1,270 patients on the Oviva digital UK Tier-3 programme: fewer sick days, reduced healthcare resource use, real outcomes beyond the scale. The findings ran in seven major UK national outlets, including The Times (front page), The Guardian and The Telegraph, and were discussed on today’s Good Morning Britain. 📈 What it shows is something we've been arguing for a long time: effective obesity care doesn't just help individuals. It eases pressure on overstretched health systems and on the economy. That case used to be a hard sell. The data is doing the talking now. 🤝 Huge thanks to Dagmara Wozniak, PhD, MBA, Dr. Felix Schirmann and Yannick Schindler for the work behind this, and to the wider Oviva team in Istanbul this week. Full Times article in the comments ⤵️

Back to Oviva’s Swiss roots 🇨🇭 Today I had the pleasure of joining the business lunch of the Swiss ambassador Livia Leu here in Berlin together with other startup and scale up companies. Germany remains the 🥇market for Swiss companies to expand to. This was also the case for Oviva several years ago. From the conversations over lunch I took away: * AI remains the hot topics and I feel we are doing well at Oviva of integrating it (newly founded companies that go AI-first are big source of inspiration for us) * Berlin is still a great place for growing companies in Europe and Germany. Despite some voices in the room debating the heydays are over (as having growing up as a teenager in Berlin in the 90s I have a different perspective) * Germans (and maybe Swiss people as well?) always like to complain and rarely call out the good things the government or regulators have done for them. A bit more balanced approach would do well. Thank you Die Botschaft der Schweiz in Deutschland for the invitation. I am looking forward to the next time.

The scale of the UK’s cardiometabolic challenge is impossible to ignore. Around two-thirds of adults are either overweight or obese, while cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of premature death, which places enormous pressure on both the NHS and the wider economy. This morning, Oviva convened leaders from the NHS, government, clinical academia and policy to explore what a modern, integrated service for cardiometabolic health could look like, chaired by Pam Garside from the Cambridge Health Network . There was clear alignment that while GLP-1s present a major opportunity, sustainable outcomes will depend on combining them with structured wraparound care that can be delivered at scale. This is an industry-wide challenge that will require partnership, new approaches to delivery, and a willingness to act. Thank you to everyone who joined, this is an important conversation that Oviva will continue in the coming months.

Germany's statutory health insurers currently spend around €400 million a year on digital health applications (DiGA). Obesity alone costs the country an estimated €113 billion in direct and indirect costs annually. It’s worth pausing on that ratio. At Oviva , we have treated several hundred thousand patients in Germany and employ several hundred medical and technical staff here. Health economic modelling indicates our intervention avoids thousands of Euros in downstream costs per patient over ten years. Fewer complications, fewer hospital stays, earlier and more consistent treatment of a chronically underserved condition. I want to address what is currently being proposed. The draft bill would introduce standardised, volume-linked discounts for DiGA, up to 30% at the upper threshold. This is intended to reflect the assumed declining marginal costs of digital products. But there is a meaningful problem with this logic: for obesity alone, fewer than 1% of the patients who could benefit from a DiGA currently have access to one. We are at the very beginning of relevant scale and certainly not at the point where economies of production make deep discounts coherent. More fundamentally, the Commission for Health Care Finance did not identify DiGA as a material cost driver in statutory health insurance. It did suggest targeted caution around apps where clinical evidence is still being established. The current draft goes considerably further: it applies volume-based discounts across all digital health applications, including those that have already gone through the full evidence and pricing process. The practical effect of this design is that the services most penalised will be the ones that are actually working. Germany built something genuinely important with the DiGA framework. A number of countries, including France, Japan, Austria, Switzerland, South Korea, are watching closely and building on it. The infrastructure, the regulatory pathway, the reimbursement logic: all of it took years to get right. I am confident there is a version of cost discipline in this space that is both sustainable for the health system and consistent with the investment and scaling dynamics that make digital health viable. We are ready to contribute to that conversation.

Good to step back with the senior leadership team this week to set our OKRs and sharpen our focus for the period ahead. In a fast-moving health and policy environment, clarity of priorities matters. For Oviva , setting OKRs is not just about targets. It is about alignment, accountability and making sure every part of the organisation is working towards the same outcomes. What stood out most was the depth of commitment across the team to improving patient outcomes and building a model of care that is both scalable and sustainable. Onwards and upwards! Denis Silva Karsten Wolke Beate Müller Hannah Foladi Leila Nayebi Alessia Tidman Lucy Diamond Gaurav Kumar Helana Scott Waseem Majeed Shaine Mehta Camille Ciglia Melanie Schwendimann Ella Rowley Elliot Pearce Robin Higginson Andy Hodges

During my PhD, Nature papers were the academic Everest you'd look up from base camp. So seeing one land right in our field - with someone from our team among the authors - makes me proud. "Mechanisms of Action for Digital Therapeutics" just published in npj Digital Medicine and it tackles something that has been missing in current discussions: a proper conceptual framework for how DTx actually work. The key insight: engagement ≠ therapeutic effect The paper introduces three dose categories: → Intended Dose: what the DTx is designed to deliver → Consumed Dose: what the patient actually uses (logins, sessions, content) → Realized Dose: the actual cognitive or behavioral change that happens Only the Realized Dose drives clinical outcomes. Time-in-app is a proxy at best. This has direct implications for how performance-based reimbursement in the DiGA pathway should be designed and why getting the success metrics right matters so much. Congrats to the team behind this: Ariel Dora Stern , Linea Schmidt , Benedikt Langenberger , Simon Reif , and Oviva ’s very own Dr. Felix Schirmann 👏🏻