Insulet’s wearable insulin patch Omnipod may be able to seamlessly control insulin delivery for patients with diabetes, but it can’t fill all mental health-related treatment gaps on its own. To broaden its network of personalized care offerings, the company is teaming up with mental health platform Calm to roll out a host of holistic "Mind in Range" resources.
Insulet and Calm’s free-to-access mindfulness tools, launched Tuesday, July 14, are specifically tailored to the diabetes community and include short meditations, a breathing exercise and a new Calm Sleep Story narrated by fashion model Lila Moss, a diabetes patient and advocate. The collaboration marks Calm’s first integrated content partnership with a medtech company and aims to “normalize conversations” around mental health care in diabetes management, while also making mindfulness “simple and accessible,” Insulet explained in a release.
People with diabetes are 20% more likely to develop anxiety, according to the company, putting into focus Insulet’s mission to position mental health as an “essential role” in diabetes management. Moreover, 66% of people with diabetes and 46% of caregivers report poor-quality sleep driven by diabetes-related stress and anxiety, according to Insulet.
“Global data suggest that nearly 80% of people living with diabetes suffer burnout from the emotional strain and demands of daily management. We hold ourselves to a clear standard: do more for people while asking less of them,” the medtech’s chief growth officer Manoj Raghunandanan explained. “Partnering with Calm recognizes the emotional dimension of diabetes and expands the support we provide beyond physical outcomes.”
After joining Insulet as its first chief growth officer in August last year, Raghunandanan learned “very quickly” that diabetes is a disease that impacts people in “multiple ways,” extending beyond the clinical, physical needs that can be met by the Omnipod device, he said in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing.
Reducing the “mental load” that the condition comes with was top of mind for Insulet, Raghunandanan said, pointing to research that shows people with diabetes make 180 incremental decisions each day. The tedious decision-making involved with disease management can also prompt “a lot of stress and anxiety,” he explained. This compounds with the mental health harms that could be associated with the stigma the disease still holds, which is something Insulet has worked to combat in other ways through increased representation of people with diabetes.
“There was no better way for us to really help people than to go in space of mindfulness,” the executive said.
Calm's forray into diabetes care
Top-charting relaxation app Calm launched in 2012, bringing meditation and mindfulness to the app store long before online wellness tools took off more recently. In the years since, Calm has evolved from a “meditation app into a mental health app,” Chris Mosunic, Ph.D., who serves as chief clinical officer at Calm’s clinical healthcare offshoot Calm Health, explained in a separate interview.
Upon working out the collaboration with Calm, the health app’s team clued Insulet into the tools that would likely be the most helpful for the community, and the Omnipod maker in turn leaned on its “for diabetics, by diabetics” philosophy to help put together the content, Raghunandanan said. Calm, on its end, relies on subject matter experts when tailoring programming for disease-specific patient groups, while user feedback sessions with patients themselves later allow Calm to “home in and get the right voice of the community,” Mosunic added.
“It felt like a natural fit,” Raghunandanan said of the partnership.
Calm and Insulet's Omnipod also fit nicely next to each other on a phone screen, as both are available as phone apps. Omnipod’s technological advances in diabetes care “happened so fast,” Mosunic, who also specializes in diabetes education, said. “It’s a holy grail.”
Not progressing as fast, he says, is the understanding of emotions in relation to diabetes. Not only does the impact of each of the 180 decisions diabetes patients make a day impact blood glucose, but so does the emotional weight of managing the hoards of decisions itself.
“If you get stressed, your blood sugar is going to go up,” Mosunic explained. “If you don’t have that under control, no technology in of itself is going to just do that for you. You have to be able to control the mind.”
“You can’t separate the nervous system from the metabolism,” he explained. “They’re interconnected.” Thus, helping to calm the mind and control the body, as Omnipod and Calm can do together, is “a no brainer,” he said.
Mindfulness exercises have “been around forever,” but only more recently has the tool been more accepted as a medical regimen for chronic conditions, he said. Calm’s Sleep Stories, meanwhile, can reach many communities and demographics with different celebrity narrators appealing to different groups. Type 1 diabetes patient Moss, for her part, is “able to speak to that community authentically, because she’s in it.”
Calm Health dipped its toes into disease-specific community programming in 2023, when it partnered with the Mayo Clinic to design digital mental health programs to guide cancer patients through anxiety and depression care.
Mosunic hails this collaboration with Insulet, however, as a first for the pharma world with a company “leaning into that mental health aspects in a really big way,” he said. “That’s really going to close the gap.”
Insulet’s Omnipod marketing push has made it the “most recognized brand in the category, which continues to bring in new users and generate traction with prescribers that our sales force doesn't actively target,” CEO Ashely McEvoy said on an investor call in May. The company’s device has recently made an appearance on an episode of ABC’s “Scrubs” revival, when chief of surgery character Christopher Turk, played by actor Donald Faison, flexed his Omnipod wearable and his ability to “dose insulin from my phone for any meal I want,” Turk said in the episode.
The feature was a “resounding success” at raising awareness, leaving Insulet’s inboxes “flooded with stories about how meaningful and moving it is to see people with diabetes show up like this, living their lives daily with ease,” McCoy said. Over 2026’s first quarter, revenue from the company’s collection of Omnipod products jumped 36.9% to reach $758.4 million, Insulet reported.
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