It starts with one expert dietitian.
She mentors a dietitian in every market.
Each one leads certified community health workers.
Expertise, community, and commitment, working as one.
We build programs for the populations that need them.
BAJA™ IMPACT: Because Alone It's Just Not Achievable. Integrated Multidisciplinary Program for Advancing Community Training.
BAJA™ IMPACT trains community health workers and dietitians to deliver weight management that prevents diabetes and lowers cardiovascular risk, closing the engagement gap that's kept Hispanic/Latino adults from benefiting from it.
Heart disease rarely begins with a heart attack.
It begins as excess weight, then risk factors, then cardiovascular disease itself, a path called the Cardiovascular-Kidney-Metabolic (CKM) syndrome.
The earliest stages are still reversible. That's exactly where BAJA™ IMPACT steps in.
Stage 1: excess weight
Overweight, obesity, or prediabetes. Our core population, and 5–7% weight loss here cuts diabetes risk by 58%.
Stage 2: risk factors
Hypertension, type 2 diabetes, early kidney disease. Where this population is headed without intervention.
Stages 3–4: cardiovascular disease
Heart disease and stroke, the leading causes of death in Hispanic/Latino adults.
It's attendance, not biology.
20 million Hispanic/Latino adults have prediabetes, the highest rate in the country.
The National Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) works for just 0.05% of them. 60,000 have enrolled since 2012, only 9,600 succeeded.
Everyone else, nearly all 20 million, is left without a path forward. Without intervention, excess weight becomes prediabetes, prediabetes becomes type 2 diabetes, and diabetes becomes the cardiovascular disease already killing more Hispanic/Latino adults than anything else.
Hispanic/Latino adults carry the country's highest prediabetes burden, and get the least out of the program built to prevent it. Not because the science works differently for them. Because they don't stay long enough for it to work at all.
Once you account for how many sessions someone actually attends, weight-loss results are the same across every group. Engagement, not language, not biology, is the barrier that's fixable.
A system to scale.
BAJA™ IMPACT gives community health workers and dietitians a structured way to work together at scale, each at full scope of practice, with expert mentorship built in.
Community health workers bring group cohesion
Bicultural, BAJA certified CHWs lead the culinary-nutrition and physical-activity sessions.
The local dietitian holds clinical scope
Every nutrition decision, medical nutrition therapy, clinical judgment, escalation, stays with a Registered Dietitian (RD).
One expert hub mentors every site
A central specialist dietitian tele-mentors each local team: fidelity checklists, coaching, and an escalation path, so expertise scales with reach.
An operating system, not a single program.
We license provider organizations a standardized way to deploy community health workers and dietitians at scale, at full scope of practice, with structured mentorship behind them.
Participate to lead
Community members complete the program as participants first, then train to lead it.
Top-of-license practice
CHWs lead the sessions people show up for. The dietitian keeps full authority over nutrition therapy and clinical judgment.
Hub-and-spoke mentoring
One specialist hub tele-mentors every site with fidelity checklists and coaching, so quality scales.
Built with the community for the community.
Our feasibility pilot, Paso a Paso, ran the participate-to-lead model with 18 community-leader trainees and 30 community members. BAJA™ IMPACT standardizes it for wider use.
Published in Translational Behavioral Medicine (Cedillo, Zepeda, Wu, Molina, Conroy, Vol. 16, Issue 1, 2026, ibag054). Read the study
Per 100 Hispanic/Latino adults with prediabetes who enroll, over three years
With higher retention, BAJA™ is predicted to prevent 39% more cases of type 2 diabetes than an average National Diabetes Prevention Program.
About $43K more in avoided medical costs for every 100 people enrolled, over three years.
How we calculated this: 73 of every 100 enrollees still in BAJA at about four months, compared with 53 in an average National Diabetes Prevention Program. Each person who stays gets the same credit in both programs: 20% who would otherwise develop type 2 diabetes within three years × 58% lower risk × $12,022 in extra yearly medical costs per case, counted for an average of 1.5 years. Program costs are not included.
Registered Dietitian care is billed as Medical Nutrition Therapy (97802–97804) where the payer covers the diagnosis. Community Health Worker time is billed as Community Health Integration (G0019/G0022) where the payer recognizes these codes and a physician or advanced practice clinician bills them. Coverage varies by plan and state.
Strong implementation team
Program lead Maribel Cedillo, DMSc, RD, and clinical lead Diego Ize-Ludlow, MD, an endocrinologist and health system executive, working together on diabetes and nutrition research since 2009.
Validated in the market
90 stakeholder conversations across payers, community clinics, and public health organizations, confirming both demand and delivery fit.