According to VentureBeat, on December 11, 2025, Michigan-based health plan Priority Health announced a partnership with Kivo Health to deliver AI-powered virtual care for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Priority Health, a nonprofit serving over 1.3 million members, will make Kivo’s virtual pulmonary rehabilitation program available to its Medicare, Medicaid, and HIDE-SNP members across the state. The initiative targets a condition that affects more than 600,000 Michiganders and is a major driver of hospitalizations. The program combines personalized treatment plans, remote monitoring, and live coaching with the goal of managing symptoms and improving quality of life from home. Priority Health President Nick Gates stated the partnership is about providing care “when and where” members need it.
Virtual care meets value-based reality
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just another telehealth app. It’s a specific, targeted move into value-based care for a notoriously expensive chronic condition. COPD leads to huge costs, mostly from those preventable hospital readmissions the press release mentions. By partnering with Kivo, Priority Health is basically outsourcing a high-risk, high-cost patient population to a specialist, betting that Kivo’s AI and coaching can keep people healthier and, crucially, out of the hospital. That’s the financial engine here. It’s less about flashy AI and more about using data and remote support to control costs in a value-based payment model. Makes perfect sense for a regional health plan.
The AI angle is subtle but critical
So what’s the AI actually doing? It’s probably not diagnosing anyone. In a program like this, AI’s role is in the background: personalizing rehab exercises, analyzing trends in patient-reported symptoms or wearable data to flag potential exacerbations early, and maybe optimizing coach workflows. Victor Sadauskas, Kivo’s CEO, calls it a “novel care model,” and he’s right. The novelty is in wrapping traditional pulmonary rehab—education, exercise, support—in a layer of predictive analytics and making it scalable. The real test won’t be the technology, but patient engagement. Can you get someone to consistently do breathing exercises via an app? That’s the billion-dollar question for all digital chronic care.
A blueprint for regional plans?
This feels like a blueprint we’re going to see replicated. National payers have been doing this for years, but for a strong regional player like Priority Health, partnering with a focused vendor like Kivo Health is a smart way to compete. They can’t build this expertise in-house easily. Look for other mid-sized health plans to strike similar deals for diabetes, heart failure, and hypertension. It’s a managed care trend: become an integrator of best-in-class point solutions rather than trying to own the whole stack. The risk, of course, is vendor lock-in and integrating all these disparate platforms. But for now, the incentive to reduce the cost of members with complex conditions like COPD—which affects so many in their market—is just too strong to ignore.
