Want to shed some pounds? A new Jefferson program aims to help.

Jefferson Health, the region’s largest provider of primary care, is rolling out a new research-based tool to offer patients struggling with their weight.

With $2.4 million in funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), a nonprofit that supports health research, Jefferson is building a series of classes about weight loss and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. The curriculum will cover nutrition, physical activity, and social support.

The program has been backed by research studies showing similar interventions can lead to weight loss.

The classes will discuss the physiology of obesity and excess weight, how different foods and exercise affect your weight and health, and ways to make impactful lifestyle changes, said Anna Flattau, chair of family and community medicine at Thomas Jefferson University.

“Each patient is an expert in him or herself,” said Flattau, also the enterprise chief of primary care at Jefferson Health. The goal of the program is to help each patient “understand that their experience is valid and that this is a challenging condition to manage, but something that they can also be empowered to control and to address on their own in the context of their own lives.”

The classes will take place over the course of 24 months, said Flattau — weekly at first, then biweekly, then monthly. “This is a long standing support that helps people to not only make changes, but also sustain them over time.”

The program is modeled after two PCORI-funded studies, which found that education programs in primary care, delivered via health coaches or group visits at clinics, led to significant weight loss after two years.

With 560,000 patients across nearly 100 practice sites, Jefferson Health is the largest source of primary care in the Philadelphia area, Flattau said. She estimated Jefferson primary care providers are treating 170,000 adults who are obese.

The health system’s clinicians can offer this service for their patients — all of whom will also have access to surgical options for obesity as well as blockbuster medications like Wegovy and Ozempic.

That said, Jefferson anticipates only 2,500 patients will take part in the program. “Our goal for the core contract is to do this at scale for what we estimated would be the percentage of people who would wish to participate,” said Flattau. It’s all “scalable,” she added, “so if we have interest beyond that number of patients, we will further expand the program.”

She noted that the PCORI funding covers the cost of setting up the program, not the cost of clinical providers or services, which Jefferson will cover “through our usual business models,” such as insurance billing. That’s purposeful, she added, so that the program can continue long after the PCORI funding runs out. “We’re building this to be sustainable,” Flattau said.