March 27, 2024 • 35 mins
As artificial intelligence progresses, healthcare providers are exploring how the technology can be used to offer personalized care at scale. In this episode of Smart Talks with IBM, Dr. Laurie Santos sits down with Alice Crisci, co-founder and CEO of fertility-care provider Ovum Health.
They discuss the barriers to healthcare access, the ways in which AI can be leveraged to expand the reach of healthcare providers, and how Ovum Health’s partnership with IBM and their use of watsonx has been enhancing the patient experience.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, it's Robert and Joe here. Today we've got
something a little bit different to share with you. It
is a new season of the Smart Talks with IBM
podcast series.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Today we are witnessed to one of those rare moments
in history, the rise of an innovative technology with the
potential to radically transform business and society forever. The technology,
of course, is artificial intelligence, and it's the central focus
for this new season of Smart Talks with IBM.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Join hosts from your favorite Pushkin podcasts as they talk
with industry experts and leaders to explore how businesses can
integrate AI into their workflows and help drive real change
in this new era of AI. And of course, host
Malcolm Gladwell will be there to guide you through the
season and throw in his two cents as well.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Look out for new episodes of Smart Talks with IBM
every other week on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts, and learn more at IBM
dot com slash smart Talks.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Hello, Hello, Welcome to Smart Talks IBM, a podcast from
Pushkin Industries, iHeartRadio and IBM. I'm Malcolm Glamwell. This season
we're continuing our conversations with new creators visionaries who are
creatively applying technology in business to drive change, but with
a focus on the transformative power of artificial intelligence and
(01:19):
what it means to leverage AI as a game changing
multiplier for your business. Today's episode is a case study
of sorts as AI expands its reach to different industries.
The healthcare profession is on the forefront of adoption. The
integration of AI into the healthcare industry is fostering a
more inclusive and efficient healthcare system. Pushkin's very own doctor
(01:43):
Lori Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast, sat down
for a conversation with Alice Creeshy. Alice is the co
founder and CEO of fertility care provider ovum Health. Founded
in twenty twenty three. Ovum Health consists of a multi
specialty group of board certified experts, physicians, nutritionists, and patient
(02:05):
advocates who are passionate about helping moms to be with
pre pregnancy, pregnancy and postpartum health care. As an online platform,
they are able to diagnose, treat, and manage conditions from
the comfort of patients homes. Alice became an advocate for
accessible family planning when she was diagnosed with breast cancer
(02:27):
at age thirty one. As a healthcare activist, author, cancer
and infertility survivor, she has dedicated her life to improving
access to exceptional health care, regardless of income, insurance, religion, race, identity,
or location. Alice and Laurie discuss the barriers to healthcare access,
(02:48):
the ways in which AI can be leveraged to expand
the reach of health care providers, and how ovum healths
partnership with IBM and the use of the IBM Watson
X Assistant platform has been enhancing the patient experience. Just
a heads up before we dive in. This conversation touches
on sensitive topics such as paternal health and fertility. Please
(03:12):
take care when listening. Okay, let's get to the conversation.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Alice, thank you so much for joining me. To start off,
tell me a little bit about your current role.
Speaker 5 (03:22):
Hi, Laurie, thank you so much for having me today.
I'm thrilled to be here. My current role is as
co founder and CEO of ovum Health. We are a
network of fertility telehealth clinics in the United States, and
really my job is to make sure that all the
people that we want to serve know that we exist,
and to make sure that I create a sustainable company
(03:44):
so that all the good work that my clinicians are
doing really reach the millions, truly millions of people who
need us.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
So your fertility journey began at thirty one when you
were diagnosed with cancer. That must have been awful. Tell
me about the days and weeks surrounding that news and
what was your life like.
Speaker 5 (04:00):
Yes, the way that I've always described it is that
the news almost hit the pause button on my life.
And the extraordinary thing was that it became my full
time job just managing all the diagnostic steps involved. So truly,
for the first thirty days, I was in a vortex
of all things cancer related, and I was one of
(04:23):
the lucky ones. And that a friend asked me, are
you going to freeze your eggs? I would never have
even thought to ask about it had she not brought
it up. I went into the fertility clinic, and really
what was extraordinary is that the day before my appointment
at the physical clinic, I had a telephone console. This
is before the term telehealth or telemedicine was even a thing. Okay,
(04:45):
because it was so many years ago. She called my phone.
Speaker 6 (04:48):
There was no.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
Video conferencing even invented yet. So it was five pm
on a Tuesday, and it was already day two of
my cycle, and she said to me, Alice, if you're
going to do this, you have to start tomorrow morning
at seven am. So I had less than twenty four
hours to make the biggest decision of my life. And
(05:09):
at the time, I had a boyfriend who was working
in the front bedroom of my home. Okay, I walk
into that room and say, okay, I'm all excited. We
have to freeze embryos. And he looked at me and
he goes, We're not going to do that. And I said,
what do you mean, We're not going to do that?
He said, no, I'm not going to do that with you.
I said, why wouldn't you do that with me? And
(05:31):
he told me then that he didn't think we had
a future together. And in that moment, I was on
my own. So when I walked into the Fergility clinic
the next morning, they handed me a catalog of sperm donors.
Speaker 6 (05:47):
So can you imagine.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
Okay, I'm already dealing with cancer, completely overwhelmed, and I
get handed a catalog of sperm donors and it was
all these statistics, so it looked like I was picking
a basketball team and like, who do I think is
going to be MVP this year? And I had a
friend with me at the appointment who said, no, I
think this is going to be so much fun, and
I handed the catalog to her and I.
Speaker 6 (06:08):
Was like, great, you pick.
Speaker 5 (06:10):
So part of the journey was such a massive learning
curve so fast. But going through fertility preservation helped me
focus on life after cancer. So I always fundamentally deeply
believed I'm going to get through this cancer, but I
also knew I wanted to live the life I imagined afterwards,
and that whole experience started that journey what is life
(06:31):
going to look like after I get through all this trauma?
Speaker 6 (06:35):
But for me, I felt.
Speaker 5 (06:36):
The fertility preservation experience was incredibly life affirming.
Speaker 6 (06:41):
You know.
Speaker 5 (06:41):
I loved the self injections because it felt like I
finally was doing something for my life rather than having
the medical community do something to me.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
And so talk about how that experience led you to
the founding of Fertile Action and med Answers.
Speaker 5 (06:56):
Well, I literally walked out of the fertility clinic that
same day, the business manager had handed me kind of
like pushed a piece of paper across her desk to
show me how expensive the treatment was going to be.
It was a twenty thousand dollars expense, and I know
almost flipped out. I thought, Wow, am I going to
do this? And you could see the look on her face.
(07:17):
She almost felt devastated that in my time of need,
she couldn't just give this to me. My friend Jen
was on the phone with the only nonprofit that existed
at the time, who basically was telling her I don't qualify.
I meanwhile, was on the phone with my American Express
card getting an increased limit. So that moment was the
gate first game changer, because I walked out of the
(07:39):
office and I looked at my friend Jen, and I said,
we're going to start a nonprofit. We're going to fix this.
I felt offended that there would be a financial criteria
to determine who gets help and who doesn't. I think,
you're thirty one years old, you're at the prime of
your career. You're still climbing the ladder. You haven't made it.
I barely had enough years to, you know, put into
(07:59):
a four to one or an IRA I don't have
a nest egg. You know, this was not something that
I felt like we needed to make people prove that
they have financial need. The cancer is the need, and
I was offended that insurance didn't cover it, and insurance
was willing to cover a wig, they were willing to
cover reconstructive breasts, and so it seemed that society was
(08:21):
telling me it's more important to us that you look
like a woman when you're done with us than actually
produce offspring like a woman. I was really disturbed by that.
So that was the first pivotal moment of starting a charity,
was because I wanted to educate, I wanted to advocate, and.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
So talk about how that passion ultimately evolved into the
launch of Oval Health in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 5 (08:45):
Well, what ended up happening is I was doing all
this advocacy work and all this legislative change, and I
was educating all up and down California. But I also
was witnessing the spread of misinformation on Facebook groups. At
the time, I knew a lot of nisions and I
had them on text, and so these women were asking
questions on these groups and I was able to get
(09:05):
an answer within fifteen minutes from my professional network. So
I thought, okay, well, there's got to be a better
way to do this. So with my business partner, the
illustrious doctor Santiago Munet, who's a world renowned reproductive geneticist
and researcher, I emailed him and I said, we got
to do something about this. There's got to be a
digital way to let everyone have access to the people
(09:27):
that he and I know, and they should be able
to ask questions in a safe, protected environment by actual experts,
not their peers pretending to be an expert. We all
have that person who's like, well, I had this experience
and is therefore my experience pertains to your experience and
it's just not personalized at all. So I thought, with
(09:47):
technology where it's at, there's no reason not to create
an app that can connect the public with a trusted
network of professionals. That was the first thing that we
did and we ran that for years. So we have
over night thousand pieces of clinically validated content, multidisciplinary specialists
who have answered patient questions as volunteers, which is extraordinary.
(10:10):
But what we saw in the data because we collected
so much health information on our users, We saw that
they weren't being diagnosed with infertility, yet they had been
infertile for.
Speaker 6 (10:19):
More than three years.
Speaker 5 (10:21):
And because they weren't diagnosed with infertility, they also weren't
being diagnosed with the underlying conditions causing infertility. So, to me,
infertility is a frustrating diagnosis because it's based on time.
It's not based on labs, it's not based on imaging,
it's not based on anything except you don't have the
outcome that you want in the timeframe that the professional
(10:42):
societies has deemed relevant. If you're under the age of
thirty five and haven't gotten pregnant the old fashioned way
in a year, you have a disease diagnosis of infertility.
The medical community wasn't telling women that in the same
way that I had someone call me and say, I'm
sorry to break the bad news you have breast can answer.
If we don't know that somebody has infertility, then they're
(11:04):
not looking at the underlying cause. So you have women
who are trying to figure out what's going on, and
they're turning to Facebook groups or they're turning to other
online communities. They're trying to take this supplement that supplement,
but they're not really going through a proper diagnostic journey,
and we wanted to solve that. So obe Guindes, even
(11:25):
though we think of them as the ones that deliver
the babies, they're actually not trained infertility. They're not trained
in diagnostics for infertility, and they're not trained in optimizing fertility.
And then you have the IVF doctors that are the
most extreme treatment possible that has helped millions of babies
be born worldwide and is a wonderful treatment, but it
(11:48):
doesn't need to be the first line of treatment. There
are so many conditions that can actually be treated to
help restore natural fecundity, meaning someone's ability to obv on
their own at the right time of the month, to
ensure that the size of the egg is optimal, to
ensure that the timing of the egg release is optimal,
(12:08):
and to ensure that sperm has the best possible chance
of getting to the egg for a fertilization event to happen.
When you look at all the optimization steps that are possible,
it's a miracle that anybody gets pregnant on their own. Okay,
it really is. And I think we're all raised with
the idea that when we want to have a baby,
we think it's going to be easy and it's going
(12:29):
to be fine. Because we've spent all of our lives
telling young people how not to get pregnant, that we
make it seem like they're going to look at a
man and get pregnant, and that's just not what's So
we can help same sex couples optimize their attempt as well.
And you know that is both on the male side
and on the female side. So really, Ovumhealth was created
(12:51):
to solve a huge gap that exists, and it's not
just in the United States, it's worldwide between an OBEGI
and an IVF doctor. So we can get all those
diagnostics done and then we can do medical nutrition therapy
first to start optimizing each step of the fertility process,
and then use pharmaceutical solutions to kind of take over
(13:12):
the cycle ovulatory experience to make sure that we are
helping to craft the most effective and efficient timed intercourse
cycle possible.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
So your situation was just so awful right where you
had to pay for your treatment on an AMEX card.
I'm curious what the current state of access is for
family building treatments in the US. Is there's still this
higher socioeconomic barrier for fertility treatment compared to other health issues.
Speaker 5 (13:37):
Sure, there definitely is, and it varies widely. So with
ovum Health, we are practicing medicine in a lane that's
covered by insurance. We're not doing anything that falls outside
of your normal kind of consultative approach to accessing specialty care.
Because of this, we're covered by insurance. There are some
(13:59):
innovative testing platforms that are not covered by insurance, so
we work with our patients to help them with all
their out of pocket expenses. We do offer financing in house,
We offer payment plans. We try to be as flexible
as possible to make sure that there is no socioeconomic barrier.
I have one hundred and seventy six insurance contracts as
(14:21):
of today in eight states. I intend to be in
all fifty states by the end of next year with
insurance contracts. My hunches will have over six hundred contracts.
That includes Medicaid. So there are plenty of things that
Medicaid pays for. And it's not just our ability to
help someone have a healthy pregnancy, it's our ability to
help someone have a healthy baby. And that means that
(14:41):
we have to support women through the reproductive continuum. So
what ovum is really creating is being the glue at
kind of every step of that experience for a woman
in the IVF setting. Yes, there are still huge gaps
in coverage. There are a lot of programs out there,
like Carrot and Progeny that have targeted large employer market
(15:03):
as a specialty insurance product. Only point three percent of
reproductive age people work for large employers, so it's really
important that we still access IVF coverage through your basic
health insurance plans like the etna's and the Blues and
the United Healthcares. That's where you still have coverage gap,
(15:24):
and so much of that is dependent on who your
employer coverage is through, and so much of that is
if you're self insured or if you're on Medicaid, et cetera.
So Medicaid currently doesn't cover infertility services, and Medicaid pays
for about half of the pregnancies and live births in America.
So we have to start thinking more broadly about treatment options.
Speaker 4 (15:47):
And so walk us through a typical patient journey with
ovumhealth from first contact to final outcome. What are all
the ways that Ovum helps them build a family.
Speaker 6 (15:55):
Yes, that's a great question.
Speaker 5 (15:56):
So really, the first thing that we're looking at is
a diagnostic journey that we want to get people through rapidly.
So in a traditional healthcare environment, if you have to
see the number of specialists that are under one roof
at ovum, it probably would take you six months to
see all of them, and you'd have six to twelve
different appointments because that's how many specialists we're bringing onto
(16:20):
your case. So you initially meet with our nurse practitioner
to review your medical history. We do ask you to
fill out quite a bit of data because we want
it to be again as efficient as possible for you.
We don't want to waste your time. We want to
make sure that we are well prepared to be able
to ask all the follow up questions and review that
medical history so that we can turn around and order
(16:42):
your lab work right away. So typically when someone calls
in to us, we actually book four appointments for them
at once so that they don't have any delays. We
book that first visit, we book the lab appointment for
them at their local lab. After the lab visit, then
our patients get to meet with the lead clinician on
their case, and that's usually when they get an initial
(17:02):
diagnosis from the lab work and the history that we reviewed.
At that point, then we probably need to send them
for imaging. We need to do fallopian tube evaluation, uterinevaluation,
and ovaryanvaluation, and they then get paired with a nurse navigator.
That nurse navigator's job is to help them understand what
(17:22):
their treatment options are going to be. The doctor had
already reviewed the treatment options. However, as we all know,
we are trying to take in as much information as
we can in that doctor visit, and then as soon
as we get in the car, as soon as we
get off the phone, we think of thirty questions to ask,
so we pair them with a nurse navigator so that
they have somebody to ask all those follow up questions efficiently.
(17:44):
At that point, then we lay out kind of what
the next three to four months of their life is
going to look like. In all cases, we assign them
a registered dietitian, so they have a nurse navigator that
is the glue of their case and helping to facilitate
every next step. They're assigned a registered dietitian, and they
even get a patient advocate who's kind of advocating for
their insurance, helping them understand what else they need where
(18:07):
they need to order it. It could be a custom
supplement list, it could be an at home continuous hormone
monitoring kit. It could be their molecular sperm testing kit
for their partner as well. So we line up kind
of the diagnostic journey first, but in a lot of cases,
we're already starting some medical nutrition therapy or MEDICATEID weight loss,
or working with the registered dietitian even alongside some of
(18:30):
the other steps because we have some of the diagnoses already.
We know people who are insulin resistant, so we know
what kind of diet plan we need to help them with.
We know the lifestyle changes we need to pair them with.
We're even adding PT into our practice so that we
can customize exercise plans specific to somebody's condition.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
But ovum Health is also launching during this pivotal moment
in AI, and so I'm curious, was it always the
plan to leverage this technology for ovum or was it
more of an organic evolution to this point.
Speaker 6 (18:59):
It was both.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
It was always my intention that we needed to have
AI enabled technology to be able to scale faster and
to also be able to improve quality control across so
many states, because how do you really do that? I
need to upscale all different levels of healthcare providers, Then
(19:20):
how do we efficiently kind of manage that clinical excellence experience?
And the only way to really do that is to
create clinical decisions support tools that everybody utilizes that are
very easy to make sure that we're managing our care
in a consistent fashion.
Speaker 6 (19:36):
How else could we possibly do it?
Speaker 5 (19:38):
State by state experience level varies, So that was always.
Speaker 6 (19:43):
Kind of the plan.
Speaker 5 (19:45):
The area that I didn't even know was possible was
this area of being able to reach the masses truly
through an AI tool through the Fertility Answers app. So
when IBM approached me for that partnership, the bells went off.
Always knew that I couldn't scale voluntary humans. I have
a network of over four hundred medical professionals across so
(20:07):
many disciplines. We're talking mds, genetic counselors, geneticists, psychologists, obigiinds, naturopaths,
functional medicine docs. I have about thirteen different specialties, all
willing to answer free questions but relying on that voluntary
basis is not something that can scale. It's a beautiful
(20:30):
thing that they're doing, and it's created ninety thousand pieces
of clinically validated content, but we needed to move beyond
kind of the initial interaction being a human answering the
question and leverage.
Speaker 6 (20:43):
AI to be able to do that.
Speaker 5 (20:45):
So what was really extraordinary for me is that I
had my eyes kind of opened by IBM to see
what was possible for my practice with AI. Once that
seed was planted, then the world opened up. We have
four tools that we're working on right now. The first
has already been integrated, which is the Fertility Answers App.
(21:07):
So the initial experience for women and mostly women because
they're the ones download the app, but we take men.
Speaker 6 (21:14):
I promise we're not excluding them. We see both.
Speaker 5 (21:16):
It takes two and they have the opportunity to access
all that content in a personalized way through the IBM
Watson Assistant chatbot, so that is incredible. We're also deploying
a revenue cycle management tool. You can imagine with all
these different contracts that I have one hundred and seventy
six contracts and eventually I'll have probably six hundred contracts
(21:40):
they all have different price lists. Makes it very difficult
to forecast what's in my electronic medical record system for
that day based on the type of insurance. Now, even
within one insurance contract, they might have hundreds of insurance
plans that have all various mechanisms for what we can
and expect to build. You might have co insurance, you
(22:03):
might have a deductible, you might have a copay, and
it varies planned to plan. We're dealing with a level
of medical literacy in this country that is very low,
and the layperson doesn't understand their insurance all the time.
Speaker 6 (22:19):
How am I.
Speaker 5 (22:19):
Expected to be able to deal with truly thousands of
combinations of insurance plans based on these contracts. You have
to have AI just to tackle that big data issue.
So we have a revenue cycle management tool that is
also helping us with an automated clinical workflow, and that's
what a wonderful partner we have called cloud Astra, who
is also in the IBM ecosystem. So it's incredibly exciting
(22:43):
to know that I can come out of a startup
mode profitably because we're deploying smart tools from the beginning.
Then we also have in development our fertility Clinical decision
support tool to really scale the clinical experience so that
we're analyzing genomic data, lab data, clinical data, and even
(23:05):
self reported data from our users in a way that
helps our clinicians know what to do next. And that's
all based on standard of care guidelines, all evidence based medicine,
but built into a really useful tool to help them
do their job more efficiently. Recently, the International Guidelines for
PCOS polycystic Ovarian Syndrome updated guidelines. There were two hundred
(23:30):
individual points in these guidelines. Two hundred and that's for
one condition, So imagine you multiply that across dozens of conditions.
You can't expect a human to retain that information and
to be able to recall it right when someone's in
front of them. So tools that have IBMS AI enabled
(23:51):
are really critical to do an exceptional job in healthcare.
And then the fourth tool that we're creating with IBM
is a medical nutrition therapy tool that we can scale
beyond our registered dietitians and be able to help women
really optimize their fertility, health and wellness by having personalized
approach to medical nutrition therapy.
Speaker 6 (24:12):
And that also requires AI.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
So when you decided to go big and introduce AI
in so many different ways to scale up your app
and your business. More broadly, why did you pick IBM
as a partner?
Speaker 5 (24:22):
IBM was an easy yes when we were approached about
this partnership for so many reasons.
Speaker 6 (24:27):
I'm not an AI startup, I'm.
Speaker 5 (24:30):
A healthcare startup, and it's very important that I don't
waste resources trying to figure out AI all by ourselves.
We needed to be very fast to market and needed
to be with a trusted partner. IBM brought that to
the team right away. But secondarily, the IBM team that
I've been exposed to is incredible. So from a partnership standpoint,
(24:53):
the team has made it easy, joyful. There's some of
the smartest people that I've had the play to work with,
and so I think the culture of what IBMS created
for startups is very unique and truly every single aspect
of the team that I've worked with, from the developers
themselves that build labs, to the customer success team to
(25:15):
my day to day team, I mean, my goodness, it
is just a dream team. So IBM made it as
easy as possible for me to say yes.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Alice really helped open my eyes to the challenges facing
providers in an industry as sensitive and individualized as fertility care.
It makes sense that scalability would be an issue, but
with the help of AI, ovum Health has been able
to solve a few of the extraordinary challenges of bringing effective,
affordable fertility care to the general public, from multiplying the
(25:49):
impact of its medical professional network to enabling more accurate
forecasting of complex contracts. Patients are benefiting directly and indirectly
from the integration of AI across the healthcare journey.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
A lot of people have nuanced health questions that are
unique to them due to their own personal health history,
maybe their lifestyle factors, or the specific medications they're taking.
How does the Fertility Answers bot personalize all its responses.
Speaker 6 (26:17):
Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 5 (26:18):
So when we onboard our users, we do ask them
to fill out quite a bit of health information, and
we have ninety nine percent compliance rates on the health
information that people fill out. So when you ask a question,
you're asking it with all your health information already attached
to it. The library of responses then shows you questions
(26:40):
and answers of people who are similar to you. If
that doesn't answer your question, you still have a chance
to route your question to the same volunteer network of
professionals that existed before the bot was there.
Speaker 4 (26:54):
And so some problems, especially those related to fertility and
needle care, require human to human connection, right This is
what or built for as primates to kind of engage
with our families as the chatbot addresses such a personal
health need. How easy is it for a doctor to
interject or for a patient to request care from a doctor.
Speaker 5 (27:11):
Very easy, and that was super important to me. One
of the things that I love the most out of
IBM was that I had the chance to infuse empathy
directly into the bought experience. I didn't want something that
sounded or came off as robotic, but it is incredibly
easy and the Watson Assistant flow for someone to request
(27:31):
that immediate human connection. We have a chat feature that
gets to a patient advocate right away, We have a
feature where they can route their question to that network
of experts right away, and we have a feature where
they can book a console with one of our medical
professionals right away as well.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
So you have over sixty seven thousand users now, which
is kind of amazing. How do you get them to
feel the kind of trust and empathy people expect from
their healthcare provider, especially in the fertility space.
Speaker 5 (27:58):
In our case, a very human brand, So from the
moment that someone interacts with our content, they're already experiencing
clinically validated answers in the form of video. We don't
ask people to download and register our app upon the
first touch point. We are infusing medical education into the
(28:19):
community through video so that they can start to build
that brand trust with us from the beginning. What I've
noticed is that because our brand is such human connection,
we've built up so much trust. And it's not just
about the app experience. It's also how active our Instagram is,
where we answer live questions for people in Instagram lives,
(28:42):
so there's multiple ways for people to get served for
virtually free and an unlimited fashion. We've vetted all the
providers for them so they don't have to do that.
So I think that there's multiple things that go into
building brand trust, and that's why we show sort of
the profile of someone who asked a similar question already,
(29:03):
so that they can find themselves in that Oh wow,
that person who asked my similar question or almost my
exact same question, also is thirty seven years old or
also has PCOS or also has endo. So there are
different ways that we are able to kind of get
into the psychology of our community to make sure that
they feel heard. And I think whenever anybody feels truly heard,
(29:27):
then that trust is possible.
Speaker 4 (29:30):
So this season of Smart Talks features new creators, visionaries
like you who are creatively applying technology in business to
drive change. I know that you have a Bachelor of
Science in Media, Arts and Design. How does this creative
background inform what you do? Is CEO of Opum Health.
Speaker 6 (29:45):
Oh, that's such a great question.
Speaker 5 (29:47):
That I use my degree every single day and I'm
not a spring chicken, so I've had that degree for
quite a while, Laurie. Every CEO has a i would
say leading skill set. You know, there are some that
are leading financial type people. There's some that are leading
kind of business to business salespeople. I am very much
(30:08):
a leading marketing type CEO. So for me, the patient experience,
the user experience, that human experience is kind of everything
that I stand for and I'm about and it must
be authentic. And because of the background that I have,
I love nothing more than co producing with my chief storyteller,
Joshua Noonan, who's been with me forever. We love co
(30:30):
producing content. It could be a twenty two second video
that that's educational, it could be an hour long course,
you know, for professionals. And so I do feel that
I bring that media, arts and design background to kind
of my type of leadership, and storytelling is kind of everything.
You know, Being a great storyteller, no matter what your
(30:53):
brand is or no matter the type of leader you are,
is the way that kind of attracts and connects people
to us. And it's you know, fortunate that social media
has created this visual world that we live in and
this video based world that we live in as well.
Speaker 4 (31:07):
So you're an activist for accessibility and inclusivity and healthcare.
If you could look years down the line, how do
you see creative applications of technology like fertility answers changing
how we talk about women's health.
Speaker 5 (31:18):
Well, first, I think that these tools need to be
covered by insurance. So I think what is going to
be the game changer in the value based care market
is that insurance is going to figure out that by
creating a reimbursement mechanism for more digital therapeutics, but also
for digital diagnostic tools is going to lead to a
(31:38):
much more cost effective healthcare society, no matter what kind
of insurance type or plan that we have. So on
the accessibility side, those tools are really meaningful to the
future of healthcare. I would also say that technology creates
a more democratized health care environment. A lot of our
patients live four hours from a type of specialist that
(32:01):
they need four hours, you know, a lot of them
are at least an hour an hour and a half
from a major lab. So leveraging these types of tools
gets them the answers that they need faster, which will
lead to better intervention earlier. And that's where we come
down to healthy mamas, healthy babies, make happy families.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Awesome.
Speaker 4 (32:21):
That's a great way to end. Thank you allis so
much for being with us on smart Talks today. It
is such great work that you were doing to help
women in families. So thank you for all your work
and thanks for our chat today.
Speaker 6 (32:31):
Thank you Laurie.
Speaker 5 (32:32):
It's such an honor to get to be on Smart
Talks and it was a delightful conversation.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
That about wraps up today's episode. I want to send
a huge thank you to Laurie and Alice for deepening
the way I think about AI's expanding role in the
future of healthcare. It was illuminating to hear a first
hand account of how providers are already integrating the power
of transparent, human centric generative AI through Watson X. It's
(33:03):
enabling telehealth platforms to multiply their impact and is quickly
becoming essential to offering comprehensive care to patients. As our
conversation with Laurie and Alice showed, accessibility has long been
an issue facing patients, particularly in the fertility space. With
the help of technology from IBM, overumhealth is meaningfully expanding
(33:26):
its reach to women who previously may not have been
able to access personalized fertility care. Steps like these are
helping to usher in a new age in healthcare, one
that holds incredible potential for both patients and providers. Yet,
as new technology is implemented, it needs to be done
with responsibility and care. Using emerging technologies in sensitive feels
(33:50):
like fertility has the power to transform how people receive care, But,
as Alice emphasized, only if patient needs are central to
how we implement solutions. Ovum Health already has over sixty
seven thousand users. Just think of all the pregnancies that
have been supported by the platform, and as we just heard,
(34:13):
this is only the beginning. It's exciting to see how
this new technology will continue to reach people in need.
Smart Talks with IBM is produced by Matt Romano, Joey
fish Ground and Jacob Goldstein. We're edited by Lydia Jane Kott.
Our engineers are Jason Gambrel, Sarah Bruguier, and Ben Tolliday.
(34:34):
Theme song by Gramoscope. Special thanks to Andy Kelly, Kathy
Callahan and the eight Bar and IBM teams, as well
as the Pushkin marketing team. Smart Talks with IBM is
a production of Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia.
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
(34:54):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Malcolm
Glad
Hey everyone, it's Robert and Joe here. Today we've got
something a little bit different to share with you. It
is a new season of the Smart Talks with IBM
podcast series.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Today we are witnessed to one of those rare moments
in history, the rise of an innovative technology with the
potential to radically transform business and society forever. The technology,
of course, is artificial intelligence, and it's the central focus
for this new season of Smart Talks with IBM.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Join hosts from your favorite Pushkin podcasts as they talk
with industry experts and leaders to explore how businesses can
integrate AI into their workflows and help drive real change
in this new era of AI. And of course, host
Malcolm Gladwell will be there to guide you through the
season and throw in his two cents as well.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Look out for new episodes of Smart Talks with IBM
every other week on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts, and learn more at IBM
dot com slash smart Talks.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Hello, Hello, Welcome to Smart Talks IBM, a podcast from
Pushkin Industries, iHeartRadio and IBM. I'm Malcolm Glamwell. This season
we're continuing our conversations with new creators visionaries who are
creatively applying technology in business to drive change, but with
a focus on the transformative power of artificial intelligence and
(01:19):
what it means to leverage AI as a game changing
multiplier for your business. Today's episode is a case study
of sorts as AI expands its reach to different industries.
The healthcare profession is on the forefront of adoption. The
integration of AI into the healthcare industry is fostering a
more inclusive and efficient healthcare system. Pushkin's very own doctor
(01:43):
Lori Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast, sat down
for a conversation with Alice Creeshy. Alice is the co
founder and CEO of fertility care provider ovum Health. Founded
in twenty twenty three. Ovum Health consists of a multi
specialty group of board certified experts, physicians, nutritionists, and patient
(02:05):
advocates who are passionate about helping moms to be with
pre pregnancy, pregnancy and postpartum health care. As an online platform,
they are able to diagnose, treat, and manage conditions from
the comfort of patients homes. Alice became an advocate for
accessible family planning when she was diagnosed with breast cancer
(02:27):
at age thirty one. As a healthcare activist, author, cancer
and infertility survivor, she has dedicated her life to improving
access to exceptional health care, regardless of income, insurance, religion, race, identity,
or location. Alice and Laurie discuss the barriers to healthcare access,
(02:48):
the ways in which AI can be leveraged to expand
the reach of health care providers, and how ovum healths
partnership with IBM and the use of the IBM Watson
X Assistant platform has been enhancing the patient experience. Just
a heads up before we dive in. This conversation touches
on sensitive topics such as paternal health and fertility. Please
(03:12):
take care when listening. Okay, let's get to the conversation.
Speaker 4 (03:18):
Alice, thank you so much for joining me. To start off,
tell me a little bit about your current role.
Speaker 5 (03:22):
Hi, Laurie, thank you so much for having me today.
I'm thrilled to be here. My current role is as
co founder and CEO of ovum Health. We are a
network of fertility telehealth clinics in the United States, and
really my job is to make sure that all the
people that we want to serve know that we exist,
and to make sure that I create a sustainable company
(03:44):
so that all the good work that my clinicians are
doing really reach the millions, truly millions of people who
need us.
Speaker 4 (03:52):
So your fertility journey began at thirty one when you
were diagnosed with cancer. That must have been awful. Tell
me about the days and weeks surrounding that news and
what was your life like.
Speaker 5 (04:00):
Yes, the way that I've always described it is that
the news almost hit the pause button on my life.
And the extraordinary thing was that it became my full
time job just managing all the diagnostic steps involved. So truly,
for the first thirty days, I was in a vortex
of all things cancer related, and I was one of
(04:23):
the lucky ones. And that a friend asked me, are
you going to freeze your eggs? I would never have
even thought to ask about it had she not brought
it up. I went into the fertility clinic, and really
what was extraordinary is that the day before my appointment
at the physical clinic, I had a telephone console. This
is before the term telehealth or telemedicine was even a thing. Okay,
(04:45):
because it was so many years ago. She called my phone.
Speaker 6 (04:48):
There was no.
Speaker 5 (04:49):
Video conferencing even invented yet. So it was five pm
on a Tuesday, and it was already day two of
my cycle, and she said to me, Alice, if you're
going to do this, you have to start tomorrow morning
at seven am. So I had less than twenty four
hours to make the biggest decision of my life. And
(05:09):
at the time, I had a boyfriend who was working
in the front bedroom of my home. Okay, I walk
into that room and say, okay, I'm all excited. We
have to freeze embryos. And he looked at me and
he goes, We're not going to do that. And I said,
what do you mean, We're not going to do that?
He said, no, I'm not going to do that with you.
I said, why wouldn't you do that with me? And
(05:31):
he told me then that he didn't think we had
a future together. And in that moment, I was on
my own. So when I walked into the Fergility clinic
the next morning, they handed me a catalog of sperm donors.
Speaker 6 (05:47):
So can you imagine.
Speaker 5 (05:48):
Okay, I'm already dealing with cancer, completely overwhelmed, and I
get handed a catalog of sperm donors and it was
all these statistics, so it looked like I was picking
a basketball team and like, who do I think is
going to be MVP this year? And I had a
friend with me at the appointment who said, no, I
think this is going to be so much fun, and
I handed the catalog to her and I.
Speaker 6 (06:08):
Was like, great, you pick.
Speaker 5 (06:10):
So part of the journey was such a massive learning
curve so fast. But going through fertility preservation helped me
focus on life after cancer. So I always fundamentally deeply
believed I'm going to get through this cancer, but I
also knew I wanted to live the life I imagined afterwards,
and that whole experience started that journey what is life
(06:31):
going to look like after I get through all this trauma?
Speaker 6 (06:35):
But for me, I felt.
Speaker 5 (06:36):
The fertility preservation experience was incredibly life affirming.
Speaker 6 (06:41):
You know.
Speaker 5 (06:41):
I loved the self injections because it felt like I
finally was doing something for my life rather than having
the medical community do something to me.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
And so talk about how that experience led you to
the founding of Fertile Action and med Answers.
Speaker 5 (06:56):
Well, I literally walked out of the fertility clinic that
same day, the business manager had handed me kind of
like pushed a piece of paper across her desk to
show me how expensive the treatment was going to be.
It was a twenty thousand dollars expense, and I know
almost flipped out. I thought, Wow, am I going to
do this? And you could see the look on her face.
(07:17):
She almost felt devastated that in my time of need,
she couldn't just give this to me. My friend Jen
was on the phone with the only nonprofit that existed
at the time, who basically was telling her I don't qualify.
I meanwhile, was on the phone with my American Express
card getting an increased limit. So that moment was the
gate first game changer, because I walked out of the
(07:39):
office and I looked at my friend Jen, and I said,
we're going to start a nonprofit. We're going to fix this.
I felt offended that there would be a financial criteria
to determine who gets help and who doesn't. I think,
you're thirty one years old, you're at the prime of
your career. You're still climbing the ladder. You haven't made it.
I barely had enough years to, you know, put into
(07:59):
a four to one or an IRA I don't have
a nest egg. You know, this was not something that
I felt like we needed to make people prove that
they have financial need. The cancer is the need, and
I was offended that insurance didn't cover it, and insurance
was willing to cover a wig, they were willing to
cover reconstructive breasts, and so it seemed that society was
(08:21):
telling me it's more important to us that you look
like a woman when you're done with us than actually
produce offspring like a woman. I was really disturbed by that.
So that was the first pivotal moment of starting a charity,
was because I wanted to educate, I wanted to advocate, and.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
So talk about how that passion ultimately evolved into the
launch of Oval Health in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 5 (08:45):
Well, what ended up happening is I was doing all
this advocacy work and all this legislative change, and I
was educating all up and down California. But I also
was witnessing the spread of misinformation on Facebook groups. At
the time, I knew a lot of nisions and I
had them on text, and so these women were asking
questions on these groups and I was able to get
(09:05):
an answer within fifteen minutes from my professional network. So
I thought, okay, well, there's got to be a better
way to do this. So with my business partner, the
illustrious doctor Santiago Munet, who's a world renowned reproductive geneticist
and researcher, I emailed him and I said, we got
to do something about this. There's got to be a
digital way to let everyone have access to the people
(09:27):
that he and I know, and they should be able
to ask questions in a safe, protected environment by actual experts,
not their peers pretending to be an expert. We all
have that person who's like, well, I had this experience
and is therefore my experience pertains to your experience and
it's just not personalized at all. So I thought, with
(09:47):
technology where it's at, there's no reason not to create
an app that can connect the public with a trusted
network of professionals. That was the first thing that we
did and we ran that for years. So we have
over night thousand pieces of clinically validated content, multidisciplinary specialists
who have answered patient questions as volunteers, which is extraordinary.
(10:10):
But what we saw in the data because we collected
so much health information on our users, We saw that
they weren't being diagnosed with infertility, yet they had been
infertile for.
Speaker 6 (10:19):
More than three years.
Speaker 5 (10:21):
And because they weren't diagnosed with infertility, they also weren't
being diagnosed with the underlying conditions causing infertility. So, to me,
infertility is a frustrating diagnosis because it's based on time.
It's not based on labs, it's not based on imaging,
it's not based on anything except you don't have the
outcome that you want in the timeframe that the professional
(10:42):
societies has deemed relevant. If you're under the age of
thirty five and haven't gotten pregnant the old fashioned way
in a year, you have a disease diagnosis of infertility.
The medical community wasn't telling women that in the same
way that I had someone call me and say, I'm
sorry to break the bad news you have breast can answer.
If we don't know that somebody has infertility, then they're
(11:04):
not looking at the underlying cause. So you have women
who are trying to figure out what's going on, and
they're turning to Facebook groups or they're turning to other
online communities. They're trying to take this supplement that supplement,
but they're not really going through a proper diagnostic journey,
and we wanted to solve that. So obe Guindes, even
(11:25):
though we think of them as the ones that deliver
the babies, they're actually not trained infertility. They're not trained
in diagnostics for infertility, and they're not trained in optimizing fertility.
And then you have the IVF doctors that are the
most extreme treatment possible that has helped millions of babies
be born worldwide and is a wonderful treatment, but it
(11:48):
doesn't need to be the first line of treatment. There
are so many conditions that can actually be treated to
help restore natural fecundity, meaning someone's ability to obv on
their own at the right time of the month, to
ensure that the size of the egg is optimal, to
ensure that the timing of the egg release is optimal,
(12:08):
and to ensure that sperm has the best possible chance
of getting to the egg for a fertilization event to happen.
When you look at all the optimization steps that are possible,
it's a miracle that anybody gets pregnant on their own. Okay,
it really is. And I think we're all raised with
the idea that when we want to have a baby,
we think it's going to be easy and it's going
(12:29):
to be fine. Because we've spent all of our lives
telling young people how not to get pregnant, that we
make it seem like they're going to look at a
man and get pregnant, and that's just not what's So
we can help same sex couples optimize their attempt as well.
And you know that is both on the male side
and on the female side. So really, Ovumhealth was created
(12:51):
to solve a huge gap that exists, and it's not
just in the United States, it's worldwide between an OBEGI
and an IVF doctor. So we can get all those
diagnostics done and then we can do medical nutrition therapy
first to start optimizing each step of the fertility process,
and then use pharmaceutical solutions to kind of take over
(13:12):
the cycle ovulatory experience to make sure that we are
helping to craft the most effective and efficient timed intercourse
cycle possible.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
So your situation was just so awful right where you
had to pay for your treatment on an AMEX card.
I'm curious what the current state of access is for
family building treatments in the US. Is there's still this
higher socioeconomic barrier for fertility treatment compared to other health issues.
Speaker 5 (13:37):
Sure, there definitely is, and it varies widely. So with
ovum Health, we are practicing medicine in a lane that's
covered by insurance. We're not doing anything that falls outside
of your normal kind of consultative approach to accessing specialty care.
Because of this, we're covered by insurance. There are some
(13:59):
innovative testing platforms that are not covered by insurance, so
we work with our patients to help them with all
their out of pocket expenses. We do offer financing in house,
We offer payment plans. We try to be as flexible
as possible to make sure that there is no socioeconomic barrier.
I have one hundred and seventy six insurance contracts as
(14:21):
of today in eight states. I intend to be in
all fifty states by the end of next year with
insurance contracts. My hunches will have over six hundred contracts.
That includes Medicaid. So there are plenty of things that
Medicaid pays for. And it's not just our ability to
help someone have a healthy pregnancy, it's our ability to
help someone have a healthy baby. And that means that
(14:41):
we have to support women through the reproductive continuum. So
what ovum is really creating is being the glue at
kind of every step of that experience for a woman
in the IVF setting. Yes, there are still huge gaps
in coverage. There are a lot of programs out there,
like Carrot and Progeny that have targeted large employer market
(15:03):
as a specialty insurance product. Only point three percent of
reproductive age people work for large employers, so it's really
important that we still access IVF coverage through your basic
health insurance plans like the etna's and the Blues and
the United Healthcares. That's where you still have coverage gap,
(15:24):
and so much of that is dependent on who your
employer coverage is through, and so much of that is
if you're self insured or if you're on Medicaid, et cetera.
So Medicaid currently doesn't cover infertility services, and Medicaid pays
for about half of the pregnancies and live births in America.
So we have to start thinking more broadly about treatment options.
Speaker 4 (15:47):
And so walk us through a typical patient journey with
ovumhealth from first contact to final outcome. What are all
the ways that Ovum helps them build a family.
Speaker 6 (15:55):
Yes, that's a great question.
Speaker 5 (15:56):
So really, the first thing that we're looking at is
a diagnostic journey that we want to get people through rapidly.
So in a traditional healthcare environment, if you have to
see the number of specialists that are under one roof
at ovum, it probably would take you six months to
see all of them, and you'd have six to twelve
different appointments because that's how many specialists we're bringing onto
(16:20):
your case. So you initially meet with our nurse practitioner
to review your medical history. We do ask you to
fill out quite a bit of data because we want
it to be again as efficient as possible for you.
We don't want to waste your time. We want to
make sure that we are well prepared to be able
to ask all the follow up questions and review that
medical history so that we can turn around and order
(16:42):
your lab work right away. So typically when someone calls
in to us, we actually book four appointments for them
at once so that they don't have any delays. We
book that first visit, we book the lab appointment for
them at their local lab. After the lab visit, then
our patients get to meet with the lead clinician on
their case, and that's usually when they get an initial
(17:02):
diagnosis from the lab work and the history that we reviewed.
At that point, then we probably need to send them
for imaging. We need to do fallopian tube evaluation, uterinevaluation,
and ovaryanvaluation, and they then get paired with a nurse navigator.
That nurse navigator's job is to help them understand what
(17:22):
their treatment options are going to be. The doctor had
already reviewed the treatment options. However, as we all know,
we are trying to take in as much information as
we can in that doctor visit, and then as soon
as we get in the car, as soon as we
get off the phone, we think of thirty questions to ask,
so we pair them with a nurse navigator so that
they have somebody to ask all those follow up questions efficiently.
(17:44):
At that point, then we lay out kind of what
the next three to four months of their life is
going to look like. In all cases, we assign them
a registered dietitian, so they have a nurse navigator that
is the glue of their case and helping to facilitate
every next step. They're assigned a registered dietitian, and they
even get a patient advocate who's kind of advocating for
their insurance, helping them understand what else they need where
(18:07):
they need to order it. It could be a custom
supplement list, it could be an at home continuous hormone
monitoring kit. It could be their molecular sperm testing kit
for their partner as well. So we line up kind
of the diagnostic journey first, but in a lot of cases,
we're already starting some medical nutrition therapy or MEDICATEID weight loss,
or working with the registered dietitian even alongside some of
(18:30):
the other steps because we have some of the diagnoses already.
We know people who are insulin resistant, so we know
what kind of diet plan we need to help them with.
We know the lifestyle changes we need to pair them with.
We're even adding PT into our practice so that we
can customize exercise plans specific to somebody's condition.
Speaker 4 (18:48):
But ovum Health is also launching during this pivotal moment
in AI, and so I'm curious, was it always the
plan to leverage this technology for ovum or was it
more of an organic evolution to this point.
Speaker 6 (18:59):
It was both.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
It was always my intention that we needed to have
AI enabled technology to be able to scale faster and
to also be able to improve quality control across so
many states, because how do you really do that? I
need to upscale all different levels of healthcare providers, Then
(19:20):
how do we efficiently kind of manage that clinical excellence experience?
And the only way to really do that is to
create clinical decisions support tools that everybody utilizes that are
very easy to make sure that we're managing our care
in a consistent fashion.
Speaker 6 (19:36):
How else could we possibly do it?
Speaker 5 (19:38):
State by state experience level varies, So that was always.
Speaker 6 (19:43):
Kind of the plan.
Speaker 5 (19:45):
The area that I didn't even know was possible was
this area of being able to reach the masses truly
through an AI tool through the Fertility Answers app. So
when IBM approached me for that partnership, the bells went off.
Always knew that I couldn't scale voluntary humans. I have
a network of over four hundred medical professionals across so
(20:07):
many disciplines. We're talking mds, genetic counselors, geneticists, psychologists, obigiinds, naturopaths,
functional medicine docs. I have about thirteen different specialties, all
willing to answer free questions but relying on that voluntary
basis is not something that can scale. It's a beautiful
(20:30):
thing that they're doing, and it's created ninety thousand pieces
of clinically validated content, but we needed to move beyond
kind of the initial interaction being a human answering the
question and leverage.
Speaker 6 (20:43):
AI to be able to do that.
Speaker 5 (20:45):
So what was really extraordinary for me is that I
had my eyes kind of opened by IBM to see
what was possible for my practice with AI. Once that
seed was planted, then the world opened up. We have
four tools that we're working on right now. The first
has already been integrated, which is the Fertility Answers App.
(21:07):
So the initial experience for women and mostly women because
they're the ones download the app, but we take men.
Speaker 6 (21:14):
I promise we're not excluding them. We see both.
Speaker 5 (21:16):
It takes two and they have the opportunity to access
all that content in a personalized way through the IBM
Watson Assistant chatbot, so that is incredible. We're also deploying
a revenue cycle management tool. You can imagine with all
these different contracts that I have one hundred and seventy
six contracts and eventually I'll have probably six hundred contracts
(21:40):
they all have different price lists. Makes it very difficult
to forecast what's in my electronic medical record system for
that day based on the type of insurance. Now, even
within one insurance contract, they might have hundreds of insurance
plans that have all various mechanisms for what we can
and expect to build. You might have co insurance, you
(22:03):
might have a deductible, you might have a copay, and
it varies planned to plan. We're dealing with a level
of medical literacy in this country that is very low,
and the layperson doesn't understand their insurance all the time.
Speaker 6 (22:19):
How am I.
Speaker 5 (22:19):
Expected to be able to deal with truly thousands of
combinations of insurance plans based on these contracts. You have
to have AI just to tackle that big data issue.
So we have a revenue cycle management tool that is
also helping us with an automated clinical workflow, and that's
what a wonderful partner we have called cloud Astra, who
is also in the IBM ecosystem. So it's incredibly exciting
(22:43):
to know that I can come out of a startup
mode profitably because we're deploying smart tools from the beginning.
Then we also have in development our fertility Clinical decision
support tool to really scale the clinical experience so that
we're analyzing genomic data, lab data, clinical data, and even
(23:05):
self reported data from our users in a way that
helps our clinicians know what to do next. And that's
all based on standard of care guidelines, all evidence based medicine,
but built into a really useful tool to help them
do their job more efficiently. Recently, the International Guidelines for
PCOS polycystic Ovarian Syndrome updated guidelines. There were two hundred
(23:30):
individual points in these guidelines. Two hundred and that's for
one condition, So imagine you multiply that across dozens of conditions.
You can't expect a human to retain that information and
to be able to recall it right when someone's in
front of them. So tools that have IBMS AI enabled
(23:51):
are really critical to do an exceptional job in healthcare.
And then the fourth tool that we're creating with IBM
is a medical nutrition therapy tool that we can scale
beyond our registered dietitians and be able to help women
really optimize their fertility, health and wellness by having personalized
approach to medical nutrition therapy.
Speaker 6 (24:12):
And that also requires AI.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
So when you decided to go big and introduce AI
in so many different ways to scale up your app
and your business. More broadly, why did you pick IBM
as a partner?
Speaker 5 (24:22):
IBM was an easy yes when we were approached about
this partnership for so many reasons.
Speaker 6 (24:27):
I'm not an AI startup, I'm.
Speaker 5 (24:30):
A healthcare startup, and it's very important that I don't
waste resources trying to figure out AI all by ourselves.
We needed to be very fast to market and needed
to be with a trusted partner. IBM brought that to
the team right away. But secondarily, the IBM team that
I've been exposed to is incredible. So from a partnership standpoint,
(24:53):
the team has made it easy, joyful. There's some of
the smartest people that I've had the play to work with,
and so I think the culture of what IBMS created
for startups is very unique and truly every single aspect
of the team that I've worked with, from the developers
themselves that build labs, to the customer success team to
(25:15):
my day to day team, I mean, my goodness, it
is just a dream team. So IBM made it as
easy as possible for me to say yes.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Alice really helped open my eyes to the challenges facing
providers in an industry as sensitive and individualized as fertility care.
It makes sense that scalability would be an issue, but
with the help of AI, ovum Health has been able
to solve a few of the extraordinary challenges of bringing effective,
affordable fertility care to the general public, from multiplying the
(25:49):
impact of its medical professional network to enabling more accurate
forecasting of complex contracts. Patients are benefiting directly and indirectly
from the integration of AI across the healthcare journey.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
A lot of people have nuanced health questions that are
unique to them due to their own personal health history,
maybe their lifestyle factors, or the specific medications they're taking.
How does the Fertility Answers bot personalize all its responses.
Speaker 6 (26:17):
Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 5 (26:18):
So when we onboard our users, we do ask them
to fill out quite a bit of health information, and
we have ninety nine percent compliance rates on the health
information that people fill out. So when you ask a question,
you're asking it with all your health information already attached
to it. The library of responses then shows you questions
(26:40):
and answers of people who are similar to you. If
that doesn't answer your question, you still have a chance
to route your question to the same volunteer network of
professionals that existed before the bot was there.
Speaker 4 (26:54):
And so some problems, especially those related to fertility and
needle care, require human to human connection, right This is
what or built for as primates to kind of engage
with our families as the chatbot addresses such a personal
health need. How easy is it for a doctor to
interject or for a patient to request care from a doctor.
Speaker 5 (27:11):
Very easy, and that was super important to me. One
of the things that I love the most out of
IBM was that I had the chance to infuse empathy
directly into the bought experience. I didn't want something that
sounded or came off as robotic, but it is incredibly
easy and the Watson Assistant flow for someone to request
(27:31):
that immediate human connection. We have a chat feature that
gets to a patient advocate right away, We have a
feature where they can route their question to that network
of experts right away, and we have a feature where
they can book a console with one of our medical
professionals right away as well.
Speaker 4 (27:47):
So you have over sixty seven thousand users now, which
is kind of amazing. How do you get them to
feel the kind of trust and empathy people expect from
their healthcare provider, especially in the fertility space.
Speaker 5 (27:58):
In our case, a very human brand, So from the
moment that someone interacts with our content, they're already experiencing
clinically validated answers in the form of video. We don't
ask people to download and register our app upon the
first touch point. We are infusing medical education into the
(28:19):
community through video so that they can start to build
that brand trust with us from the beginning. What I've
noticed is that because our brand is such human connection,
we've built up so much trust. And it's not just
about the app experience. It's also how active our Instagram is,
where we answer live questions for people in Instagram lives,
(28:42):
so there's multiple ways for people to get served for
virtually free and an unlimited fashion. We've vetted all the
providers for them so they don't have to do that.
So I think that there's multiple things that go into
building brand trust, and that's why we show sort of
the profile of someone who asked a similar question already,
(29:03):
so that they can find themselves in that Oh wow,
that person who asked my similar question or almost my
exact same question, also is thirty seven years old or
also has PCOS or also has endo. So there are
different ways that we are able to kind of get
into the psychology of our community to make sure that
they feel heard. And I think whenever anybody feels truly heard,
(29:27):
then that trust is possible.
Speaker 4 (29:30):
So this season of Smart Talks features new creators, visionaries
like you who are creatively applying technology in business to
drive change. I know that you have a Bachelor of
Science in Media, Arts and Design. How does this creative
background inform what you do? Is CEO of Opum Health.
Speaker 6 (29:45):
Oh, that's such a great question.
Speaker 5 (29:47):
That I use my degree every single day and I'm
not a spring chicken, so I've had that degree for
quite a while, Laurie. Every CEO has a i would
say leading skill set. You know, there are some that
are leading financial type people. There's some that are leading
kind of business to business salespeople. I am very much
(30:08):
a leading marketing type CEO. So for me, the patient experience,
the user experience, that human experience is kind of everything
that I stand for and I'm about and it must
be authentic. And because of the background that I have,
I love nothing more than co producing with my chief storyteller,
Joshua Noonan, who's been with me forever. We love co
(30:30):
producing content. It could be a twenty two second video
that that's educational, it could be an hour long course,
you know, for professionals. And so I do feel that
I bring that media, arts and design background to kind
of my type of leadership, and storytelling is kind of everything.
You know, Being a great storyteller, no matter what your
(30:53):
brand is or no matter the type of leader you are,
is the way that kind of attracts and connects people
to us. And it's you know, fortunate that social media
has created this visual world that we live in and
this video based world that we live in as well.
Speaker 4 (31:07):
So you're an activist for accessibility and inclusivity and healthcare.
If you could look years down the line, how do
you see creative applications of technology like fertility answers changing
how we talk about women's health.
Speaker 5 (31:18):
Well, first, I think that these tools need to be
covered by insurance. So I think what is going to
be the game changer in the value based care market
is that insurance is going to figure out that by
creating a reimbursement mechanism for more digital therapeutics, but also
for digital diagnostic tools is going to lead to a
(31:38):
much more cost effective healthcare society, no matter what kind
of insurance type or plan that we have. So on
the accessibility side, those tools are really meaningful to the
future of healthcare. I would also say that technology creates
a more democratized health care environment. A lot of our
patients live four hours from a type of specialist that
(32:01):
they need four hours, you know, a lot of them
are at least an hour an hour and a half
from a major lab. So leveraging these types of tools
gets them the answers that they need faster, which will
lead to better intervention earlier. And that's where we come
down to healthy mamas, healthy babies, make happy families.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Awesome.
Speaker 4 (32:21):
That's a great way to end. Thank you allis so
much for being with us on smart Talks today. It
is such great work that you were doing to help
women in families. So thank you for all your work
and thanks for our chat today.
Speaker 6 (32:31):
Thank you Laurie.
Speaker 5 (32:32):
It's such an honor to get to be on Smart
Talks and it was a delightful conversation.
Speaker 3 (32:40):
That about wraps up today's episode. I want to send
a huge thank you to Laurie and Alice for deepening
the way I think about AI's expanding role in the
future of healthcare. It was illuminating to hear a first
hand account of how providers are already integrating the power
of transparent, human centric generative AI through Watson X. It's
(33:03):
enabling telehealth platforms to multiply their impact and is quickly
becoming essential to offering comprehensive care to patients. As our
conversation with Laurie and Alice showed, accessibility has long been
an issue facing patients, particularly in the fertility space. With
the help of technology from IBM, overumhealth is meaningfully expanding
(33:26):
its reach to women who previously may not have been
able to access personalized fertility care. Steps like these are
helping to usher in a new age in healthcare, one
that holds incredible potential for both patients and providers. Yet,
as new technology is implemented, it needs to be done
with responsibility and care. Using emerging technologies in sensitive feels
(33:50):
like fertility has the power to transform how people receive care, But,
as Alice emphasized, only if patient needs are central to
how we implement solutions. Ovum Health already has over sixty
seven thousand users. Just think of all the pregnancies that
have been supported by the platform, and as we just heard,
(34:13):
this is only the beginning. It's exciting to see how
this new technology will continue to reach people in need.
Smart Talks with IBM is produced by Matt Romano, Joey
fish Ground and Jacob Goldstein. We're edited by Lydia Jane Kott.
Our engineers are Jason Gambrel, Sarah Bruguier, and Ben Tolliday.
(34:34):
Theme song by Gramoscope. Special thanks to Andy Kelly, Kathy
Callahan and the eight Bar and IBM teams, as well
as the Pushkin marketing team. Smart Talks with IBM is
a production of Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia.
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
(34:54):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Malcolm
Glad
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