Constant Health is the digital evolution of the Bariatric Medical Institute, and thanks to our supporters Constant Health is able to offer a limited number of fully-funded behavioural intervention weight management programs for your patients.
To understand Constant Health’s origins, it’s helpful to look at what BMI has been doing. Currently BMI, alongside its 17 years of adult behavioural weight management program delivery, administers two Ministry of Health funded behaviour modification programs: One to parents of children with obesity, and another to patients undergoing bariatric surgery, where BMI, in partnership with the Ottawa Hospital, provides the pre and post-surgical care, education, and support for 20% of Ottawa’s bariatric surgical patients. Between BMI’s 3 programs, its experts have arguably the broadest base of patient care experience of any weight management centre in Canada, as BMI is the only center to provide ongoing behavioural programs to service both pediatric and adult populations as well as care for those undergoing bariatric surgery.
However even with BMI’s expertise in behavioral weight management, until now, its health care professionals have only been able to react to patients’ concerns and struggles after the fact in their biweekly visits. What they wanted was a way to react proactively instead, and finally, technology has progressed to the point where behavioural intervention technology can meet that need.
Designed with an equal focus on the behavioral and medical science required for long term weight management, the team at BMI spent well over a year mapping out what its ideal solution would look like. They envisioned a tool that would be completely customizable to each client's needs, medical comorbidities, and dietary preferences, that would allow health professionals to both work with and crucially monitor and respond to their successes and challenges in real-time, while creating an almost effortless and familiar process to have an interactive appointment. This was the foundation of Constant Health.
Constant Health’s 15 week program offers patients over 5 hours of one-on-one video access to registered dietitians who will work with them in knowledge translation and motivation through collaborative goal setting. Goals around dietary modification, increased physical activity, and improved health promoting behaviours (for instance the goal of not missing a dose of a prescribed medication) are monitored remotely via Constant Health’s proprietary behaviroal intervention technology, which allows our dietitians to triage patients’ real-time struggles (as identified by the provider dashboard which in turn reports on both missed and purposefully abandoned goals) for assistance and care by them as well as provide daily contact, support, and reinforcement. Constant Health’s platform also includes an embedded food diary and recipe search engine that can accommodate a patient’s preferred diet – from low-fat to keto and anything and everything in between.
Being delivered by way of a PHIPA compliant smartphone-based application (with a desktop portal as well), it will be accessible to anyone with internet access
and a smart phone.
The ideal patient to offer one of these limited, fully-funded spots, would be highly motivated and ready and wanting to affect change. Their BMI should be 27 and above with comorbidities, or 30 and above without comorbidities. Exclusion criteria would include ongoing eating disorders, mood disturbances affecting a person’s ability to plan, organize, and concentrate, or lifestyles that are themselves difficult to change and a challenge to dietary reform (eg. tremendous numbers of meals out with no stated patient interest in decreasing, or a great deal of travel, or both). Interested physicians will be afforded 10 funded programs to start with, and once allocated, depending on the percentage of selected patients who completed Constant Health’s full program, can inquire about obtaining further fully-funded spots.
To get started just fill in the form below,
download our referral form, and fax your patient referrals to 613-702-2364. That’s it. We’ll reach out to your patients, get them started, and follow up with you so that you can share in their progress.
Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly at drfreedhoff@constanthealth.ca
Sincerely,
Yoni Freedhoff
