Simon Hayhurst is the Chief Product Officer at Virta Health, a company on a mission to reverse Type 2 diabetes and improve metabolic health for millions. With a deep background in product strategy and a passion for tackling one of healthcare’s most pressing challenges, Simon has played a key role in scaling Virta’s innovative care model. At the intersection of technology, behavior change, and clinical excellence, Virta is reshaping what’s possible in chronic disease management.
In our conversation, Simon shares his insights on:
The Virta Mission and Founding Story: How a personal health journey inspired a company to tackle metabolic disease at scale.
The Evolution of Virta’s Go-to-Market Strategy: Lessons from clinical validation, early patient success, and building payer relationships.
Leveraging Technology for Personalized Care: How Virta combines human coaching and AI to deliver scalable, high-quality care.
Frameworks for Product Success: Simon’s “three-legged stool” approach to balancing patient value, payer ROI, and operational efficiency.
Doing Unscalable Things First: Why starting small is key to learning, building empathy, and refining workflows.
Planning with Now-Next-Later: A simple, flexible framework for focused product strategy in dynamic environments.
The Power of Retrospectives: How continuous improvement drives sustainable growth and team empowerment.
AI and the Future of Member Experience: The role of AI in scaling personalized, proactive, and efficient healthcare delivery.
In this episode of Concept to Care, Simon provides a fascinating look into how Virta Health is leading the charge against Type 2 diabetes and redefining health tech success. His insights into product strategy, scaling care, and leveraging AI offer actionable lessons for health tech leaders, operators, and entrepreneurs.
Some takeaways:
The Virta Mission and Founding Story
Mission: Virta aims to reverse Type 2 diabetes and tackle metabolic health challenges, including obesity, for millions of people.
Founder’s Journey: Sami Inkinen, Virta’s founder, was diagnosed with prediabetes despite being a fit, competitive athlete.
The Breakthrough: Sami reversed his diabetes within a month using a well-formulated ketogenic diet after discovering groundbreaking research.
Vision: Inspired by his personal success, Sami founded Virta to bring this life-changing approach to patients worldwide.
How Virta Health Started and Its Go-to-Market Evolution
Clinical Validation: Virta began with rigorous clinical trials, publishing results in the New England Journal of Medicine to establish credibility.
Early Lessons: The team learned that publishing data wasn’t enough—behavior change required direct engagement with patients.
Behavior Change Focus: Virta developed a scalable care model blending human coaching with a digital platform to support lifestyle changes.
GTM Strategy:
Start with patient success to prove the model works.
Build payer relationships by demonstrating cost savings and health improvements.
Align clinical and financial outcomes for long-term sustainability.
What Virta Does Today and the Role of Technology
Personalized Care: Virta provides individualized nutrition plans based on a well-formulated ketogenic diet, supported by coaching to guide patients through lifestyle changes.
Digital Tools: A mobile app allows patients to track their progress, access resources, and stay engaged, while AI-powered tools like “Viv” offer real-time, personalized support.
Clinical Monitoring: Physicians and clinicians monitor patient health metrics to ensure care is both effective and safe.
Blending Human and Digital: Virta integrates technology to enhance human coaching, ensuring scalable, high-quality care while leveraging AI to reduce reliance on human intervention without compromising outcomes.
The Three-Legged Stool for Health Tech Success
Simon Hayhurst shared a powerful framework for evaluating the viability of a health tech business, which he calls the “three-legged stool.” The success of any health tech company depends on balancing these three critical components:
Value to Patients: A health tech solution must deliver meaningful benefits directly to patients—whether through improved health outcomes, convenience, or a better experience. For Virta, reversing Type 2 diabetes rather than managing it creates a compelling value proposition that drives patient adoption and engagement.
ROI for Payers: Payers, including insurers and employers, need to see measurable cost savings or efficiencies to justify investing. Virta demonstrates ROI by reducing long-term healthcare costs through decreased medication use and improved health outcomes, backed by peer-reviewed studies.
Sustainable Business Model: A scalable health tech business must balance patient outcomes and payer value with operational efficiency. Virta achieves this by leveraging technology to scale care delivery without sacrificing quality. Tools like “Viv” streamline operations while keeping patients supported, helping align clinical success with financial sustainability.
Insights from the Peterson Report: The Cost Crisis in Chronic Care
The Peterson Report set out to explore the financial toll of chronic diseases in the U.S. healthcare system and evaluate the effectiveness of solutions aimed at addressing these costs. Its findings were both sobering and revealing:
The Findings: Chronic diseases account for 90% of U.S. healthcare spending, with Type 2 diabetes alone consuming hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The report highlighted that traditional care models—and even some digital health solutions—focus on managing symptoms rather than addressing the root causes, perpetuating unsustainable costs.
A Broken Digital Promise: The report specifically examined other digital health players that aimed to reduce costs but fell short due to a lack of measurable impact or failure to integrate meaningfully into the healthcare ecosystem. Many solutions promised innovation but were unable to demonstrate scalable, long-term savings for payers or sustainable clinical outcomes for patients.
Virta’s Relevance: Virta stands apart by tackling the root cause of Type 2 diabetes and achieving results that align clinical outcomes with financial savings. By reducing dependency on medications and preventing expensive complications, Virta addresses the challenges outlined in the report.
Why This Matters: The Peterson Report underscores that not all digital health solutions deliver on their promises. Virta’s success demonstrates how a mission-driven, science-backed approach can disrupt the cycle of chronic disease costs and set a new standard for the industry.
Balancing Human Interaction and Technology: Lessons for Builders
Simon emphasized the importance of finding the right balance between human-led care and technology in health tech solutions. This balance is crucial to scaling while maintaining patient outcomes and satisfaction. Key takeaways for builders include:
Start with Human-Led Care: Begin with a model that prioritizes meaningful human touchpoints and layer in technology to enhance efficiency and scale.
Leverage Technology to Optimize, Not Replace: Use technology to support clinicians and coaches rather than automate everything. For example, Virta’s app empowers patients with real-time tools, allowing coaches to focus on higher-value interactions.
Test Hypotheses with Lean Principles: Iterate quickly to find the right balance between human interaction and technology, ensuring effectiveness and scalability.
Focus on Personalization: Build technology that adapts to individual patient needs, offering proactive care and reactive support.
Monitor Outcomes Closely: Measure clinical results and patient satisfaction to ensure that technology complements human care delivery.
Planning with Now-Next-Later: A Framework for Focused Product Strategy
Simon emphasized that effective planning has been key to Virta’s success in navigating the complexities of health tech. By adopting a flexible and pragmatic approach, he has enabled his teams to focus on delivering high-impact work while staying adaptable in a fast-changing landscape. The Now-Next-Later framework exemplifies this philosophy.
What It Is: Now-Next-Later is a simple prioritization framework that organizes work into three categories:
Now: The immediate, fully scoped priorities being actively worked on.
Next: The near-term initiatives that follow the “Now” work, still flexible but aligned with strategic goals.
Later: Long-term ideas or goals that aren’t actionable yet but serve as a guide for future direction.
The Value of Now-Next-Later:
Simplifies Planning: Reduces complexity by focusing on sequencing work rather than committing to rigid deadlines.
Enhances Flexibility: Allows teams to adapt quickly to changing priorities or new opportunities.
Promotes Clarity: Clearly communicates priorities across teams, reducing confusion and misalignment.
Drives Focus: Keeps teams centered on the most impactful work at any given time without overcommitting.
Improves Execution: By working on only a few well-defined “Now” initiatives, teams can deliver higher-quality outcomes faster.
“We Can Do Anything, But We Can’t Do Everything”
Simon underscored the importance of focus in building impactful health tech solutions. While the opportunities in healthcare innovation are vast, spreading resources too thin can dilute effectiveness.
The Power of Focus: Concentrating on a few high-impact initiatives enables teams to deliver meaningful, well-executed solutions that drive real results.
Aligning with Core Strengths: Virta’s success comes from doubling down on its core mission—reversing Type 2 diabetes—rather than chasing tangential opportunities.
Implication for Builders: Prioritize ruthlessly. Evaluate initiatives based on how they contribute to patient outcomes, payer ROI, and long-term scalability. Saying no to good ideas can be critical to achieving great outcomes.
Do Unscalable Things First
Simon emphasized the value of starting with unscalable solutions to test ideas, learn quickly, and identify what truly works before investing in automation or building complex systems. This approach ensures resources are focused on impactful initiatives and avoids wasting time on over-engineering early on.
Validate the problem before scaling: Start small to confirm that the problem you’re solving is real and that your solution addresses it effectively. For example, manually onboarding a few patients can reveal insights about user needs and potential friction points that would be hard to discover with a fully automated process.
Focus on learning quickly: Doing unscalable work allows for fast iteration. By interacting directly with patients, providers, or other stakeholders, you can gather real-world feedback to refine your approach.
Build empathy through hands-on experience: Engaging in unscalable activities, such as personally providing support or running pilots, helps founders and teams build empathy for their users. This firsthand experience can inform product decisions and improve user satisfaction.
Delay automation until it’s necessary: Resist the urge to automate too early. Only invest in scalability once you’ve validated that your processes work and are worth optimizing. Premature automation can lock in inefficiencies and make it harder to pivot.
Iterate on processes before scaling them: Use unscalable methods to refine your workflows. For instance, manually tracking user progress or managing referrals might feel inefficient but can highlight bottlenecks and areas for improvement before building technology to support them.
Focus on delivering value, not perfection: Early adopters are often forgiving of manual or imperfect processes if they see value in the solution. Prioritize delivering outcomes over polishing every detail in the early stages.
The Power of Retrospectives
Simon highlighted how retrospectives are a cornerstone of continuous improvement at Virta, ensuring teams learn from past experiences and evolve their processes for greater efficiency and impact.
Identify What’s Working: Retrospectives provide a structured way to assess successes, enabling teams to double down on strategies that drive results.
Address Pain Points: By surfacing challenges—whether technical, operational, or interpersonal—teams can proactively resolve issues before they escalate.
Balance Speed and Quality: Virta uses retrospectives to find the right trade-off between delivering features quickly and addressing technical debt, ensuring sustainable growth.
Empower Team Growth: Retrospectives create a culture of openness and accountability, helping teams take ownership of their successes and failures while fostering collaboration.
AI and the Future of Member Experience
Simon highlighted how AI plays a pivotal role in transforming patient care, making it more personalized, efficient, and scalable. At Virta, AI enhances the member experience by focusing on these key areas:
Personalized and Proactive Support: AI tools like Virta’s food tracking assistant provide real-time, tailored guidance to help patients adhere to their care plans. These tools also predict when patients might need extra support, enabling proactive engagement that improves adherence and outcomes.
Efficient Resource Allocation: By automating repetitive tasks like answering FAQs or dietary advice, AI reduces the workload on human coaches, allowing them to focus on complex and high-value interactions.
Maintaining Trust and Transparency: Virta’s AI supports, rather than replaces, human coaching, ensuring patients trust the recommendations they receive. Transparent design and thoughtful integration of AI maintain the personal connection that patients value.
Scalable, Continuous Learning: Virta’s AI evolves over time, improving recommendations and insights based on patient data and outcomes. This ensures long-term scalability and increasing value.
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Where to find Simon Hayhurst
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/srhayhurst/
Virta Health: https://www.virtahealth.com/
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Where to find Angela and Omar:
Angela Suthrave
Omar Mousa
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Referenced:
Virta Health: https://www.virtahealth.com/
Virta Health Announces Record and Accelerating Growth at a Scale of More Than $100M in Annualized Revenue, Driven by Sustainable Weight Loss and GLP-1 Solutions: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250110748668/en/Virta-Health-Announces-Record-and-Accelerating-Growth-at-a-Scale-of-More-Than-100M-in-Annualized-Revenue-Driven-by-Sustainable-Weight-Loss-and-GLP-1-Solutions
CNBC Coverage, High cost of weight loss drugs drives employers to require nutrition counseling, in boost for startups: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/10/high-cost-weight-loss-drugs-boost-nutrition-counseling.html
Virta Health CEO, Sami Inkinen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samiinkinen
Virta Health’s clinical protocol: https://www.virtahealth.com/how-it-works
Virta Health Research Center: https://www.virtahealth.com/research
Reversing Type 2 Diabetes: An Evidence-Based Guide: https://www.virtahealth.com/reversediabetes
Peterson Health Technology Institute: https://phti.org/
Digital Diabetes Management Solutions: https://phti.org/assessment/digital-diabetes-management-tools/
Now, Next, Later Framework: https://www.launchnotes.com/blog/the-now-next-and-later-roadmap-a-comprehensive-guide-for-planning-ahead
Simon mentioned that after 1 month of being at Virta Health, he has most people at the company internalizing this quote, “we can do anything, but we can’t do everything”. Here is an article the capture why this sentiment matters: https://jpattonassociates.com/tension/
Learn more about the absolute MVP: https://leanstartup.co/resources/articles/what-is-an-mvp/
Paul Graham’s famous post, “do things that don’t scale”: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
Eric Ries, The Lean Start-up: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898
The art of retrospectives: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/art-retrospective-erica-zendell/
How to go from Engineer to Product Manager: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/how-i-moved-from-engineering-into-product-management/
How to go from Data Scientist to Product Manager: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mindset-shifts-move-from-data-scientist-become-product-apoorva-jadhav/
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