EarlyBirds Helps Business With Actioning Their Strategy To Innovate

Nov 9, 2021

November 09, 2021 - /PressAdvantage/ - Australian based EarlyBirds would like to assist its ‘Early Adopters’ who may be looking to implement their innovation strategies. As a CEO and head of strategy, an individual may find themselves facing difficulties with the implementation of an innovation strategy, and this is where EarlyBirds can help by identifying key issues and putting their clients’ strategies into action. The platform aims to create self-learning organizations which, EarlyBirds’ believes, may be the solution to finding ways of implementing innovation strategies.

Those who understand the value of innovation and have a desire to identify and implement innovative strategies are referred to as Early Adopters by EarlyBirds. These individuals are always looking for ways to solve challenges or create new products and services. Working with EarlyBirds allows them to solve challenges and seize opportunities with actionable open innovations from Innovators. The global open innovation ecosystem connects Innovators with Early Adopters and other experts in order to accelerate the speed of innovation and create an ‘innovation culture’ that can solve business and technical challenges. Visit https://earlybirds.io/en/early_adopter to learn more about the concepts of Early Adopters and self-learning organizations.

EarlyBirds says, “If you're a leader, our platform offers you innumerable advantages that you can use to drive innovation in your organization. EarlyBirds can help you gain a competitive edge, validate ideas and even provide feedback to Innovators, and the latter is particularly interesting because you will have access to over 2 million Innovators. Our platform is suitable for virtually every kind of business, from startups to scale ups and mature organizations that need solutions for any industry or commercial challenge. Through us, you can gain valuable insights into global industry innovation capability. Source, analyze and curate global Innovators for your solutions, partnerships and for more use cases. Search and buy innovations, such as proof of concepts and trials, in your industry and business functions based on what business outcomes they provide.”

In the EarlyBirds Explorer and Challenger programs, Subject Matter Experts work as independent consultants in a gig economy model. They work directly with Early Adopters to identify and come up with solutions to challenges both quickly and securely. The Explorer program is made for businesses that need innovation as a service to supplement existing innovation programs or to conduct innovation projects as and when they are required. The Challenger program, on the other hand, is designed to solve one business or technical challenge at a time. These two programs make it possible to evaluate Innovators and create a roadmap that EarlyBirds users can follow.

EarlyBirds has a long and interesting history behind it. The many years of experience and variety of issues the platform has addressed over the years have made EarlyBirds into the powerful innovation hub it is today. Kris Poria, one of the company’s co-founders, first had the idea while working for a large systems integrator on a significant project that needed a solution to manage a multi cloud environment. A series of events led to a number of professionals missing opportunities to come up with effective, innovative solutions and build up their skills. This led to the two founders of EarlyBirds, Kris Poria and Jeff Penrose, putting their skills together to build a platform aimed at linking tech Innovators, startups, scaleups and mature with Early Adopter clients in both private and public sector organizations.

They created the Explorer and Challenger programs to meet different sets of needs of Early Adopters. EarlyBirds says, “The Explorer program is designed for businesses that require Innovation as a Service to supplement existing innovation programs or to conduct innovation projects as required. The Challenger program is designed to solve one Early Adopter business challenge at a time, then search for relevant Innovators that meet the business, technical, commercial and business risk requirements. The Early Adopter can evaluate the selected Innovators, following which an agreed roadmap is published for the way forward. Now, with the EarlyBirds platform, organizations can find and engage with Innovators that already have potential solutions to their business challenges."

For more information on how to put innovation strategies into action, visit EarlyBirds.io. EarlyBirds presents a unique opportunity for networking, innovation and growth, and everyone in the tech industry has a lot to gain from the platform.

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For more information about EarlyBirds, contact the company here:

EarlyBirds
Mr Kris Poria and Mr Jeff Penrose
+61 401 287 060
[email protected]
‘FORDE’ SUITE 10, LEVEL 1, 26 FRANCIS FORDE BOULEVARD, FORDE, ACT 2914

ReleaseID: 60047346

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Why your health insurance is dropping GLP-1 coverage

The promise of GLP-1 drugs has always depended on people being able to afford them. These drugs still cost hundreds of dollars per month if you’re paying cash, at which point access becomes a privilege: The higher-income executive who wants to trim a few pounds might be able to afford them either way, but the low-income worker who needs the drug to lose significant weight might not be able to afford them — unless their health insurance covers it. For a while, the trend lines for GLP-1 insurance coverage were positive. As of 2026, roughly two-thirds of private employer plans, which insure half of Americans, were covering GLP-1 medications for weight loss to treat obesity. Over the summer, Medicare launched a new $50-per-month prescription program. The US has struggled with an obesity epidemic for decades, but it looked like powerful drugs to treat it were finally starting to be more seamlessly integrated into the health system. At least that’s how things appeared earlier this year. But now, private plans are pulling back from GLP-1 coverage. People are being left in the lurch, debating whether to try to pay for these drugs on their own or stop taking medicines they feel are making a real difference for their health. The dilemma reveals one of the structural flaws in American healthcare. For working-age adults, your insurance depends on your job. Unfortunately, because people no longer stay at the same job for decades, there is not a strong financial incentive for employers to make investments that will benefit your health in the long term — but there is a strong incentive to minimize short-term costs as much as possible. It’s the kind of perverse rationale that could compel employer-sponsored health plans to stop covering a drug that, if taken over the full course of a person’s life, could help them not only lose weight but ultimately reduce their risk of heart disease, kidney disease and other chronic health problems, improving their health and saving all of us money as they get older. “An employer or an insurer making coverage decisions doesn’t necessarily care if they’re saving Medicare money,” said Dan Sacks, a healthcare economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That’s a classic problem with the American health insurance system, and it’s certainly salient here.” This mismatch between what’s good for people’s health and what’s good for the corporate bottom line has long been one of the underlying flaws in the US health system. Now access to GLP-1 drugs is shrinking just as these drugs were starting to make a real dent in the US obesity crisis. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Why employer-sponsored health plans are suddenly dropping GLP-1 coverage From the beginning, insurance coverage was the big question hanging over GLP-1s and their potential to revolutionize US healthcare. But recently, it looked like we’d turned a corner. When I attended the Aspen Ideas: Health festival this summer, pharmaceutical reps seemed visibly relieved that GLP-1 coverage had been picking up among private insurers. In 2026, about two out of every three employer-sponsored plans were covering some of these drugs for weight management, up from about 20 percent just the year before. “They’re recognizing that this is an investment in their workforce,” said Laura Steele, who leads the cardiometabolic health unit at Eli Lilly, which manufactures Zepbound and Foundayo. “Yes, there is a budget, and there is a benefit design that every employer has. That’s real. That’s not going away. But they’re also recognizing the overall cost that they’re experiencing by not dealing with this too.” But as employers and private insurers make coverage decisions for next year, they are suddenly pulling back. At least 10 percent of employer plans that currently cover GLP-1s for weight loss say they are likely to discontinue coverage in 2027, according to one survey by the Business Group on Health — and that number may still increase. A Mercer survey of large employers found that 6 percent had dropped coverage in 2026 and another 5 percent were planning to in 2027 or actively considering it. A separate report from the Health Policy Commission in Massachusetts found that the number of commercially insured people in the state taking a GLP-1 drug had fallen by 50 percent between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 as private coverage started to drop off.  Some of the biggest brands in the US are reportedly eliminating or reducing their coverage: PepsiCo, Starbucks, and Lowe’s among them. And their reasons are simple: It’s too expensive. The drugs still carry a high net price tag — $600 or more for a 30-day supply — and potential demand is high (2 in every 5 American adults have obesity).  When a lot of people start taking an expensive medication all at once, it’s going to raise costs for employer insurance plans — and they have to figure out how to adapt. Insurers set premiums at the start of each year, based on how many people are on the plan and how much healthcare they are expected to need. But if those estimates are off — say, if more people take an expensive GLP-1 drug than the insurer expected — they have to offset those costs somehow, and raising premiums the following year is a common solution. According to one estimate, premiums are projected to grow by 5 to 13 percent due to GLP-1 costs — and the burden of paying those higher premiums is likely to fall on the workers. The employer can also try to limit GLP-1 use by, for example, asking workers to pay more out of pocket for these drugs; according to Mercer, 27 percent of large US employers instituted some kind of utilization controls for GLP-1 drugs over the past year or plan to next year. They also have the option to simply stop covering these drugs for weight loss altogether — and that’s the route more and more of them are deciding to take. The abrupt reversal has even caught economists like Sacks off guard. 3 big reasons employer health plans are dropping GLP-1 coverage Employers aren’t invested in people’s long-term health: As Americans switch jobs more often, companies want to cut short-term costs. GLP-1 prices are still high, upwards of $600 per month per person for insurers. A lot of people are eligible to take them for weight loss; 2 in 5 US adults have obesity. “I was surprised that anyone would do an about-face because I thought they understood the trade-offs well,” Sacks said. “My guess is that it turned out to be more expensive than they anticipated: take-up is higher, and possibly more people are sticking with it. That’s one reason that you might not want to continue to offer it.” For employers, the short-term costs of covering a drug often outweigh the long-term benefits that medication may confer, at least from the employer’s POV. One analysis — notably produced by Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas — concluded that covering GLP-1s for weight loss increased average employee health costs by $7,000 in the first year and another $4,200 in the second, largely due to the cost of the drugs themselves. And yet at the same time, there were no decreases in obesity-related medical events in that time period. Another study from Sacks and his colleagues at Indiana University and the University of South Carolina found that GLP-1 use did not lead to any cost savings over five years. So in the short term, these employers are arguably making an economically rational decision — but one that may still come at their employees’ expense. “I’m completely screwed,” said one person on Reddit about Cigna’s plans to drop GLP-1 coverage for their own employees. They’re looking at at least $300 for one month’s supply at cash prices.  They weren’t alone either: “I’m devastated,” said another person, commenting on Starbucks’s decision to stop covering GLP-1 drugs. They said they had an autoimmune condition that had made it difficult to lose weight — until this new class of medicines came along. Where GLP-1 coverage goes from here How could we end up here, where it makes good business sense for companies to make a decision that could potentially harm their workers’ health in the long term? It is at least in part a result of the haphazard way the US has ended up insuring people. When employer-sponsored insurance started to arise in the mid-20th century, eventually becoming the primary way to cover the working-age population, people tended to stay at the same job for a long period of time. In theory, there was a synergy: Companies wanted their workers to stay productive, and so it was worth it for the company to invest in their long-term health via their insurance benefits. And research has found that people who stay with the same company — and the same insurance plan — tend to have better health than those who switch a lot. But these days, people change jobs all the time or work various gigs to piece together an income. You probably don’t expect to stay at your job for 10 years — and your employer doesn’t expect you to either. Instead, they want to keep their own costs as low as possible in the short term. This leads them to cut GLP-1 coverage, even though doctors do believe that people could benefit tremendously long term from the weight loss these drugs help them achieve and all of its potential health benefits.  “There are very real health benefits of these drugs,” Sacks told me. “The fact that we don’t find offsets or they’re even more expensive than we thought doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t cover them.” Sign up for the Good Medicine newsletter Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox’s senior correspondent Dylan Scott has been on the health beat for a long time, and every week, he’ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what’s happening in American healthcare policy. Sign up here. In theory, the market is supposed to fix the

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