October 30, 2024 • 35 mins
Reinventing Healthcare, Four Women at a Time. In this powerful episode, I chat with Amy Louis-Bayliss, MD MSCP, and Lindsay Stollery Jephcott, two of four visionary women—three doctors and an entrepreneur—who unite to transform women’s healthcare.
Rather than rushing to build a business, they began by aligning their values and purpose, grounding their venture in a commitment to make a real impact.
Through Lume Women + Health, they tackle a crucial, often overlooked need: personalized healthcare for women. They address menopause, sexual health, and overall wellness with a unique, preventive approach.
At the same time, the episode examines the broader healthcare system’s challenges and the toll on patients and front-line workers alike. It explores the idea that a fusion of private-sector innovation and a shared vision for accessible care could bring scalable, lasting change. This conversation offers an inspiring blend of entrepreneurial grit, health advocacy, and lessons in building purpose-driven partnerships.
And their approach could change healthcare for the better across our country.
To learn more about Lume Women + Health: https://lumewomenshealth.com
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
Health means the world to all of us
and more and more we're learning that health isn't something that
we leave to chance. We can take preventative actions.
We can be more responsible about what we eat, how we sleep,
exercise, the people we invite in our lives.
(00:25):
And the show today was originally gonna be about this
breakthrough in women's health, and it still is.
But interesting enough, it also involves to a story of 4
women who've come together and are building a business. And
what you'll learn is that they're building a business the right way, And these
lessons apply to anybody that dreams of being an entrepreneur, of
(00:47):
having partners. Instead of building it from the roof down and
just focusing on what it can become, they instead focused on their
foundation, their culture, and how we can knit it together. So no
matter where this business takes us, no matter how it changes
us, we're still gonna have a north star. We're gonna still be
guided by purpose over profit. And getting back to
(01:09):
health, I'm doing a lot of shows this year on longevity and health.
I had doctor Joe Coughlin, the head of MIT AgeLab, and his
match of old age is old news. And his question that he asked, the
essential question is, is a good chance you're gonna live to a 100? Are you
ready emotionally, intellectually, financially? We could
use market forces, not just social forces, and not just
(01:31):
public policies to change this narrative of old age.
You're also gonna hear from Chip Conley, the founder of the Modern Elder Academy.
A school dedicated helping people navigate midlife transitions. So
more and more of us are actually feeling, like we're
running on fumes, and we need a midlife pit stop.
Doctor Anmol Kapoor who founded Bio Aero, a company focused in
(01:54):
advanced personalized healthcare. I'm even having an architect on,
Ty Ferro, known for his innovative approach to designing buildings
that make us healthier. The spaces are created as
an accelerant for our biological, our physiological, and our
psychological health and well-being. But today,
my show focuses on women's health. More
(02:16):
specifically, a new clinic that's opening called Lume
Women + Health. It's already got an immediate wait list, and you'll
soon learn why. As the founders are using their platform,
their intellectual, their emotional capital to personalize women's
health and share everything they're doing to the rest of the
world. They're focusing on areas like menopause and sexual
(02:38):
health, bone health, and overall well-being. There are 4 founding
partners. 3 are doctors, doctor Sarah Naomi Shah,
doctor Wagoni Falati, and doctor Amy Louis-Bayliss,
and then one who brings extraordinary entrepreneurial and business
acumen, Lindsay Jefkot. And today, I'm gonna speak to 2 of
them, doctor Amy Louis-Bayliss and then Lindsay Jepchott. And you're
(03:00):
gonna get a masterclass in building a business and
also getting an appreciation for what healthcare can be
if we let it happen.
It's Tony Chapman. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcast. A big shout out
to RBC for not only sponsoring chatter That Matters, but for all
(03:20):
they're doing to invest in healthcare workers and healthcare across
Canada.
Lindsay and Amy, welcome to A Chatter That Matters. Thank you for having
us. We're super excited to be here. Amy, I wanna begin by having
a better understanding of why medicine has become your passion and
(03:41):
why you're so passionate about personalizing it so
women can get the health care they deserve. I come from a health care family.
My father is a surgeon. My mother is a nurse. And so growing up, I
was always exposed to the idea of helping people
and the job satisfaction, that my parents both had.
I gravitated towards the sciences. And then when I was doing my
(04:04):
undergrad actually at McMaster University, I got a job working as a
clerk in the emergency department and that was really my first exposure
face to face to health care. And to say I was enthralled,
like, really invested in what the
emergency room looked like would be an understatement. I
(04:25):
love the idea of seeing teams work together to provide care.
I love the ability to quickly help someone, and then I like the
diversity. Like, when I was doing, you know, as time went on and I was
doing cardiology and then obstetrics and then gynecology and pediatrics,
I loved how everything came to the emergency department. So that's really
what inspired my interest in certainly applying
(04:48):
to medical school and definitely my initial career choice in emergency
medicine. Most of us are voyeurs. We turn on the television set, and
we get swept up in these shows about the emergency room.
I'm just curious as how close to reality are they
versus what you experienced both as an intern and obviously inside your
career when you actually started practicing medicine? So you have to understand, I've been
(05:10):
doing this now for 20 years, and what emergency medicine has looked
like from 20 years ago to today with COVID,
with, lack of primary care availability, with
wait times is very, very different. But, yeah, certainly, when
I started, it was it was incredible in terms
of every case I saw was extremely exciting. The
(05:32):
ability in my early twenties to put stitches in and correct
a broken bone and manage a motor vehicle collision,
was very exciting. Certainly, as time goes on, you
see that the excitement that you might see on TV probably takes
up about 5 to 10% of what you're actually seeing in
emergency medicine. And a lot of emergency medicine is
(05:55):
setting expectations for patients and educating them around why they came to
emergency in the first place. It's, you know, it's
hard navigating our healthcare system right now, and
patients are at a breaking point where they just wanna go to emergency and, you
know, figure out what's going on. And so setting expectations about what you
can and can't do, within the scope of emergency,
(06:18):
has become really more of the focus of certainly what it looks
like. A sidebar question because I've been reading a lot on this
sort of supply and demand, and we're at this crisis point in health care. But
I'm sensing you're saying is that there's a lot of times when you don't
need to go to an emergency room. What we're doing is we're stretching
these finite resources across what's almost seems like
(06:40):
infinite demand. So is it part of the answer educating people
more so that they know when to go and when they should be thinking
about other areas to find peace of mind or to find some kind
of answer to what's ailing them. Yeah. I mean, when I think a lot actually
about the emergency medicine experience that most patients
face today, which could be an 8, 10 hour wait, can
(07:04):
be actually very draining, especially if it's 2, 3 in the morning.
And I I actually think that there's a few things contributing to it. First
of all, we are now in a stage where information is
available to everyone at the drop of a hat. You can look up,
you can Google, you can social media check any kind of
information, and I think we have a society that is looking for rapid
(07:26):
answers. And so when you have symptoms, when you
have chest pain or abdominal pain, this feeling of needing to
address it immediately, I think, is pushing a lot of people to the emergency
department. It's also really hard to get ahold of your family doctor these
days. I mean, I am a physician, and even navigating care for my own
kids can take 20, 30 minutes waiting on a phone call
(07:47):
waiting for someone to pick up the phone. It can take 3, 4 weeks for
me to get in to see my physician. And then the third piece is is
because the emergency department is so overwhelmed, we also don't have the
resources to manage the flow put of these patients. So, you
know, if you require blood work, if you require an ultrasound, there's no
capacity in the hospital to be able to manage that journey in a quick
(08:09):
way, and we're lacking hospital beds. So a lot of the emergency
department is actually filled with patients that are waiting for a spot
inside the hospital, and that really delays the ability to
actually manage patient flow. So I wanna talk about those experiences
and how it's led to you to what you're doing today, but I also wanna
talk about a life changing lecture on menopause. I think it was doctor Natalie
(08:31):
Gamache, and it was one of those times in life
where it opened up a new path for you. I think in order
to speak to the relevance of lecture with Natalie Gamache, you
have to understand a little bit about where I was when I saw that lecture.
So I had just we had just navigated being an emergency physician through
COVID. And 2 of the pieces
(08:54):
of being an ER physician during COVID that really changed
my passion, into the preventative health space was,
1, I dealt with frailty. I dealt with,
I dealt with nursing homes. I dealt with caregiver burnout. I dealt
with navigating home care in a way I had never navigated before
for a couple of reasons. For a long time, the elderly actually weren't allowed
(09:17):
to bring an advocate in with them to emergency. So when the
emerge was on lockdown, you know, in order to even see a
patient and understand why they were there required multiple phone calls on my
end. And I think I got an inner look at what
the nursing home situations were. I was able to get an inner look of what
frailty really looked like in a way that I didn't understand before.
(09:39):
And it really led me to see how much end of
life care, even the last 5, 10, 15 years of your
life, are impacted by your health. Like, the ability to
make independent decisions, the ability to be physically
capable, and mentally fit just became so
glaringly obvious that that I wanted to do better. And then the
(10:01):
second piece was all the primary care that I saw in emergency.
So, a lot of patients started coming to emerge because they wanted to be examined.
We've really switched over to had switched over to a virtual care model at that
point. And so I started managing heavy periods, started
managing blood pressure problem, started managing mental health,
and things that were really should have been in the hands of the primary care
(10:21):
physician. And I saw that there was a big gap in
medical literacy and health literacy among the patients that I was seeing,
And I thought if we could get in front of these patients, if we could
educate them, ahead of the disease experience, maybe
we could have an impact. And so I had already
started this preventative health education journey. I have been a
(10:43):
faculty lead for a very long time. I help run residency, like,
education programs, and the reason why I went to this Natalie
Gamache lecture was it was a lecture on menopause, and I thought, you know what?
I don't know much about this. I'm gonna attend this lecture,
and the lecture basically covered a couple of things. One
was it spoke about this trial that happened, started
(11:04):
in 1998, ended in 2002 called the Women's Health Initiative,
and this trial really was the nidus for women coming off of hormone
therapy. So in the nineties, hormone therapy was the most prescribed
medication for women in the world, and even today, less than 2% of
Canadian women are using hormone therapy. And that
really led to the type of education I had, which was menopause is the end
(11:27):
of the period and there's nothing we can do about. And doctor
Kamash really debunked that myth. She went over this trial. She went
over actually the benefits that had been shown in the trial, and I remember
her saying that the results of this trial was the biggest mistake
in modern day medicine that had been made by the medical community.
And I saw it I listened to this lecture, and I thought to myself, wow.
(11:49):
I had no idea how much menopause impacts a risk of disease for
women. I had no idea how it impacted your risk for osteoporosis,
heart disease, and dementia. And I thought, if I'm a faculty leader
and I'm, like, providing this educational platform and I don't know this, then
I'm pretty sure no one else does. And so I saw this really as an
educational opportunity for me, to be able to
(12:12):
shed light on this to the public and and with my patients. Where
do you get your passion? Because a lot of people I've talked in the health
care community get to the point where they just burn out. They feel
there's this the status quo is so locked in. It's impossible
to change. But you come out of these 20 years of experience in
ER. You come out of this the pandemic. You come up with all
(12:34):
these circumstances that are just almost feel impossible to move
and then this lecture and from all of this, you decide, in fact,
we are gonna make a change. We're gonna do something different. Why do you think
you're wired that way? And I don't mean this to be disparaging to other people
to just sort of say I can't do this anymore, but you decided
to dream bigger when you created Lume Woman in Health with
(12:57):
with 2 other physicians. So I'd like to say that this was just like I
had all the energy and I just do did it, but it was a journey.
So, I was struggling with what emergency had
become in terms of the opportunity to teach in terms of
feeling like it was really becoming a place where I was pushing
patients through and not having those opportunities to really provide
(13:18):
that health literacy. And but I also struggled with feeling like
a failure for wanting a career change. So, really, the transition did
involve a lot of therapy, and involved really some coaching
on I really truly believe in my heart of hearts that I'm a physician
and that I was really meant to be an educator and use my
medical platform to provide education. And so I
(13:41):
was really through the work of coaching and therapy of saying, like, how do I
change this? How do I still feel fulfilled? How do I still stay true to
my values, but, you know, make it look different? It
involved applying to the College of Physicians and Surgeons. It involved creating a 1
year retraining program to be able to do this. So it
did definitely require staying true to my values. It definitely
(14:02):
required, some emotional support and some therapy
for sure. But I look back at the last 3 years, and
I wake up every day so fulfilled right now. I'm just
so so so happy that I pushed through really
wanting to have a career that sort of met my needs and my
passion. So talk to me about how this played at home because you, you know,
(14:24):
you go into medicine, which must have made your this family of
physicians quite happy. You start sharing those early days and they must
have sort of smiled remembering their early days. But as you
move along and you start understanding the
realities of today, which must be very different than what your family had
gone through in in medicine, and then you come to this point in
(14:46):
life where you wanna change, how did that play out? Were they supportive? Were they
encouraging? Were they questioning the fact that you were trying to
change something that seemed impossible to change? I would say that my family
was probably the most supportive of all, and I think part of it was
that I didn't sort of quit medicine.
You know, I really repivoted to find fulfillment. And, you know,
(15:09):
towards the end of my emergency career, I was miserable. I
wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing. I had trouble sleeping. I had a
lot of anxiety leading up to my shift leading up to, like, doing an
emerge shift. And so I think they saw the fulfillment
and the passion and the excitement
that was renewed in me in in choosing another path. I
(15:31):
did really struggle and still struggle with this feeling of having left my
ER call ER emergency medicine colleagues behind. Because emergency is
a really tough job and it it's required. Like, we have to have emergency
medicine services for, you know, public health care to
work. And so I think that's probably the one area where
I feel maybe not actually when you talk to my
(15:53):
colleagues, they actually say, like, they admire me, but I
still think I struggle with having let them down or having left them. Lindsay, we're
gonna bring you into the show in a minute. But before we do, it wasn't
just your vision. You had to convince doctor Filate. You had
to convince doctor Sarah Naomi Shaw and doctor
Woganee Filate to also join you. I mean, that's
(16:16):
3 people with 3 very different stages in a life coming
together to form Lume, Woman, + Health. And the truth is is we actually
didn't know each other before. So I think there's this perception that we were all
lifelong friends and we decided to do this, but this was really a business
relationship. It's serendipity, honestly.
I had been thinking about opening my own clinic for actually a couple
(16:38):
of years. I've been in the menopause space for a while now, and
I actually sent Wagonee the Natalie Gamache lecture,
if you can believe it. She was a sleep physician. She had been practicing
sleep for almost 20 years, and she was seeing all these midlife
women who were coming in to be tested for sleep apnea, and they were
okay, but still couldn't sleep. And when she saw this lecture
(17:00):
and saw how menopause impacts your risk of sleep, she thought, holy
shoot. I'm missing this big opportunity to
educate around menopause that I was blindsided around and didn't
have the opportunity to learn about. And the same with Sarah. Sarah
has a background in psychology. She was a woman, she
was she specialized in women's health and psychology at at Harvard
(17:23):
actually before going into medicine and always had this interest in
women's health. She's a woman in her early fifties also going through the
menopause transition, and I think it was serendipitous in
that we were all kind of at that 15, 20 year itch in our career.
We all saw the discrepancies that were happening in
the health care system from a different angle, and we're all passionate about making a
(17:46):
different change.
So, Lindsay, you're the connective tissue from the business side of doing business.
You've got 3 practitioners all coming with a with their
strength, practicing their craft. How do you play a role
in this in terms of where you have influence and where you have authority in
terms of creating Lume Women in Health? Because there has to be a business
(18:08):
model, and there also has to be a model where your head in terms of
the the medicine you're practicing, but also the heart. In terms of how
I and what I bring to the to the journey into Lumen Human
Health, I think it's important to understand my background. So I came from I
come from a very entrepreneurial family. I had a
great grandfather who started, a haberdasher at Bloor and Young
(18:30):
on with the back of his shirt for a $1,000, and it was
there until 2014, actually, when we sold it. So it
was Staleries. And then my great grandfather my grandfather was a mining
engineer, and he staked one of the biggest uranium deposits
in the world, super successful in the mining business. And then my
dad went west and became an oil and gas entrepreneur. And
(18:52):
so, it was in my blood to sort of
do startups and be entrepreneurial. And from a
little from as little as, like, 5 years old, I remember watching
deals happen over napkins and hearing, you know,
being part of board meetings as a child and, like, just listening to it. And
so I think some families talk about, you know, politics and
(19:16):
world events, and we just always talked about business. And it was different
deals and different, industries, but always,
talking about partnerships. And I saw partnerships happening at the dining room table.
And so when it came to be that I met these women, you know,
fortuitously 2 years ago, we were all at a stage in our journeys where we
(19:36):
were ready for the next step. And I'd had the
benefit of having 15 years of investing with partners.
And we'd spent the time, and we curated, our own vision
collectively, the 4 of us, before we took the next step. We actually took the
time to understand, our passions and
our goals and our partners in
(19:57):
life and our families. And so I think spending that time is something
most people don't do. But then when we got into it, you know,
obviously, I came with more of the business side of things.
So I've had a lot of experience raising money, for example. I've had
a lot of experience, from a governance perspective. I've chaired
boards. I've sat on many boards. And in terms of strategic,
(20:20):
introductions from the business community, that's been, what I've brought to
the table, raising debt and equity, as I mentioned, and then
also philanthropy. So I've had a history in philanthropy.
And really, when I learned about the doctors and their
vision for philanthropy with this company, which is
very big and and wonderful, I learned that it was really a
(20:43):
marriage of my two passions. It was, okay, we're gonna be philanthropic, and we're
gonna have this huge giveback, which I'm very, passionate about. But
also, we're gonna create this this business, this private business. There's a
lot of people that start businesses, and the partners are
have very different skill sets. They have very different
ambitions. And often, they fail because there there isn't this connective
(21:05):
tissue. They don't have a common language, a common vernacular. Their values
aren't together. I want you to unpack a little bit about what you
did to ensure that the 4 you could have conversations, and
it wasn't about your resume or your skill set. It was about
what matters for the business and what matters for the patients we're serving. I think
to begin with, we made sure that we all had the
(21:27):
same value system. So sitting around the table, I
made everyone come to the first dinner with a list of questions that they'd answered.
And this was, you know, before we'd even taken
any money, signed any agreements. It was literally just the 4 of
us sitting at dinner, and we went around the table and we talked about our
life stories, and we talked about our goals and our
(21:49):
values. And so to make sure we had the same values. And then,
obviously, we're all we have different skill sets as you pointed out. I think we
we complement each other very well with those different skill sets without
really, to be honest, without really having thought through our personality
types. We actually balance ourselves out really well from a personality
perspective. So we've we've figured that out as well as we've gone on, and
(22:11):
I think that was just luck. I think there's a big part of
this that is luck, to be honest. But making sure, you know, as
we're doing the business plan, I have worked on boards and I understand
how to get consensus. And consensus is really important. And when
there's not consensus, trying to find a middle ground and trying
to find, a way to have everyone's voices heard
(22:34):
in a way that everyone feels, supported. At the beginning, you know, it's
all that I mean, the blooms on the rose. This is gonna be just we
are gonna change medicine, but as the realities of the business take
hold, Personalities do emerge. How do you as an
organization, I'll put it out to both you and and Amy, who
has influence and who has authority? Because there's gonna be times where decisions
(22:55):
have to be made and consensus might not be
realized. And consensus won't be realized, and we understand that. We have a
really comprehensive shareholders agreement as as most businesses
do. And, we have an understanding that we have
a voting structure that we adhere to. So, of course, we'll go to that route
if we have to. 2 of the pieces that we really made sure to build
(23:16):
in was 1, when we started, it was like, what do you want
the rest of your career to look like? I mean, we're not just starting. We've
all had about a 20 year career ahead of us. But but sorry. A 20
year career behind us. So how do we make sure we're incorporating
our dream careers going forward? We have 12 kids between the 4 of
us. We both had all have busy husbands who also have,
(23:38):
like, hardworking jobs. And so how do we make sure we structure this
company that really keeps what our dreams are in mind? And
then the second piece is for anyone who's had a deal breaker, and we've
had a couple of instances where there's been one person who felt,
you know, passionately about not making a move in this direction or
not. We've been respectable respectful of that. And I
(24:00):
think once again that comes with the maturity of having been in this for a
long time. We stop, we listen, we reflect, and go from
there. You mentioned that, you know, the family side of the business, the husbands and
the kids. I think they're part of the whole conversation
too because anytime you're starting a business, there's compromises that have to
be made. There's support that has to be earned. There's kids
(24:22):
that are they're gonna might not see as much as they used to because you're
in the startup phase. How did you bring your partners on board so
that they're part of the dream versus just cheering you from the
sideline? Our husbands are amazing, amazing supportive
partners. And so the second step, I think I mentioned we went for dinner and
we sort of got our alignment and took the next step, and the next step
(24:44):
was sitting down with the husbands. And so we took the time to get to
know each other's husbands and to make sure that they
were engaged in this process and they feel supportive. They're also,
from the sides cheering us on every step of the way. So we feel
really lucky that we've come into not only this great partnership of
women with balancing skills, but also for
(25:05):
husbands who also have balancing skills and who are terrifically
supportive. Another bonding, if my research is right, is you
this collaborative effort about It's Our Time Canada. And I want
you to talk about that because sometimes having a north star that extends
beyond your business is an incredible way to create
this commonality that we're in it together. So talk to me about what
(25:28):
It's Our Time Canada is all about, and why do you think it was
instrumental in the early days of of really establishing Lume Women in
Health? A couple of years ago, I started retraining in,
providing women's health care and mature women's health care, which
included menopause care. And in
what I was seeing out there in terms of the ability
(25:51):
in terms of, like, social media, in terms of presentations, in terms of
thought leadership, was really invested in the United States
and in the UK. I didn't really see that there was a lot of thought
leadership happening on a social media scale, on a public
scale. I mean, there are incredible thought leaders in the menopause space in
Canada. But I really saw this as an opportunity for a couple of reasons.
(26:13):
One is there's so much misinformation out there, when it
comes to menopause, menopause myths. But the second piece is our
Canadian health care system is different. And trying to
find a provider that provides menopause care is very difficult in Canada.
And so Sarah Wogany and I came together and thought, how do
we help empower women with the knowledge that they
(26:35):
need to navigate the health care system? This is not something that's
probably going to happen on its own. Your doctor is very
unlikely to sit down and talk to you about your sex life as you
age, talk to you about menopause as you age because it it's not built into
the curriculum. So women are going to have to advocate for themselves in
Canada, and in order to do that, you need to be health literate. So how
(26:56):
do we provide women with the tools? And I wanted this to be for every
woman. I didn't want this to be for only women that could pay or women
that were privileged. And so it's our time Canada was really
born out of how do we give women the skills to navigate this health care
system and how does this access everyone. And, Lindsay, you talked about your
philanthropy that there's a side about giving back because from the
(27:18):
outside, you could say, well, you're privatizing health care. And that
immediately attracts a side of media that goes, that's wrong.
We're we're universal health care. So talk to me about
what you're doing to build on what Amy just said in the sense that the
information we learn, the the things that we uncover is for everyone, not just
for our bottom line. The purpose is really what one of the
(27:40):
values that kept us together, as I mentioned, and the purpose
being creating a change in the system. We've written a white paper to
the House of Commons to make sure that, that our voice
is heard at the table. We want to change, so that there's a billing
code for menopause. There currently isn't one right now. And that there's
mandatory education in med school. So there's there's several things that we're doing from
(28:03):
a charitable give back piece. Our
clinic believes that for women in midlife, we
benefit from a proactive approach to healthy aging and wellness,
which includes care that might not be covered by the OHIP system. And as
such, we've developed program offerings that combine certain OHIP funded
care where appropriate. So certain types of menopausal symptoms and
(28:25):
sexual dysfunction would be considered within OHIP, but then the non
OHIP function would be, coaching, health goal
setting, some allied professionals, and more the wellness and prevention
side. But we believe that's an important component to properly,
dealing with a woman in med midlife for her health care. The other piece that
I just wanted to add is, like I said, I provide menopause
(28:47):
care in the OHIP system right now, and these women need me.
They need physicians to help them. And so as part of
launching Lume, we've actually created a partnership with Mount Sinai.
And so every physician that works at Lume is also going to be
providing menopause care at the Sinai Mature Women's Health Center,
and that will be completely under the OHIP system. So once again,
(29:10):
this belief in, you know, accessibility for women,
and that strong value system is actually already built into even
our clinic model. It's interesting. You know, I started talking
about revolutionizing health care, but this is also a case study in small
business because my next question would be, you're really focused
on menopause, but women's health extends way
(29:33):
beyond menopause. What else do you think you're gonna be able to do
with this model of let's practice our craft, let's create
this intellectual and emotional currency, and then share it to
Canada, if not the world. We've tried to be as innovative and pause
as possible and really understanding what women need. So with the
menopause program, it is built in there's built in proactive
(29:56):
preventive health component. There's a medical literacy and health
literacy and education component. We've developed a sexual health
model that is a doctor paired with a pelvic physio
because what we find right now is care is so siloed. You go, you see
your naturopath. You go, you see your pelvic physio. You see your psychotherapist. You see
your doctor, but no one talks to each other. So how do we create a
(30:17):
model for women which, a, saves them time, and, b, allows for
communications across allied health providers? I
am so passionate about preventive health care, and what
women don't tend to understand is that the illnesses that kill
women, heart disease, dementia, a fracture from
osteoporosis, These diseases take 10, 20, 30 years to
(30:39):
set up. These diseases are starting in your late thirties and your early forties. So
how do I empower women to understand what their health looks like right
now? What does it mean if your health looks like this at 45?
This is what it's gonna look like at 85, and can I help you create
health goals? And we can measure this on an annual basis.
And all of that, like, proactive preventative health is not built
(31:01):
into the current health care system. This is not paid for by OHIP. OHIP pays
once you have disease. Lindsey, does the sort of the entrepreneur in
this business, when you listen to this and I'm hearing this, there must be so
many different ways that you could scale what Lume is
doing, education. It could be products. It could be services.
What are your plans for this business going forward so that you
(31:24):
continue to have this north star of reinventing health care, putting
the patient at the center, but at the same time, capitalizing on the
opportunity? We're not just menopause. We're all things women's health.
And our North Star is really, to create change, to
galvanize that change within the system, but then also we'd like to be
the women's health, expert across Canada. So
(31:47):
we'd like to be opening centers all across Canada, every major
city, and, into the US as well.
We've also talked, you know, the big, big goals that are not
achievable within 1 to 5, but maybe 1 to 10. We've talked
about, Lume teen. There's a lack of access to period
care and contraceptive tier care for adolescents, so
(32:09):
that's another big lofty goal of ours. We'd like to have a
research foundation. As we see so many women coming through the clinic, there's a real
opportunity to create and gather research from the women that we're as we see so
many women coming through the clinic, there's a real opportunity to create and gather research
from the women that we're seeing and to be able to have a bigger give
give back from that component. So I think menopause the impact of
menopause in the workplace is also becoming very, very,
(32:32):
clear. There was a report that came out last year, by the Menopause
Foundation of Canada that showed that days off work,
symptoms related to menopause impact the Canadian
economy, with by with the
cost the Canadian economy $3,500,000,000 a year.
Like, this is a staggering number and so another area
(32:54):
that we focused on is how do we work with businesses, and
provide menopause support to their female employees, but also
provide education in the workplace. When we
return, I asked Amy and Lindsay a tough question. What
happens if they grow so fast that they lose everything
they believe in in terms of Lume woman and health? That they become
(33:17):
managers versus practitioners. And a big shout out to RBC for not
only sponsoring stories about positivity and possibility,
but all RBC is doing to support health care and health care workers
across Canada. Hi. This is Tony Chapman. I
wanna talk to you about what RBC Wealth Management is doing to support healthy
aging. Old age is becoming old news. We're living longer,
(33:39):
and planning for our future means we need to integrate health, wellness,
and our financial matters. RBC Wealth Management is partnering with
leading experts and organizations like the MIT Age Lab, the
National Institute on Aging, the Women's Brain Health Initiative, Elder
Caring, and the Women's Age Lab. Why? To provide you with
comprehensive resources covering every aspect of you aging
(34:02):
well. This includes support for your physical and mental health, caregiving,
maintaining financial stability, and preparing for later life health
issues, ensuring you can age safely and comfortably, and ideally
in your own home. With RBC Wealth Management, you create a personalized
plan that adapts as your needs change, giving you peace of mind and
security. Visit rbcwealthmanagement.com
(34:25):
and learn more about healthy aging and start planning for your future.
Healthy aging, well, that matters to you, to me, and to
RBC. Hi, everyone. Today, I wanna talk about
the impact of alcohol on your sleep. So this is a reminder
to book a mammogram if you need one, especially if you're
between the ages of 40 to 49. Hi,
(34:48):
everyone. Today, I wanna talk about the importance of sleep
hygiene. I wanted to remind everyone today about the role of
hormone testing to decide whether or not you are in
menopause. Joining me today are 2 extraordinary
women and 2 of the 4 founders of Lume Women + Health.
The first is doctor Amy Louis-Bayliss who almost quit medicine
(35:10):
after 20 years of dealing with the frustrations and circumstances
and instead reclaimed her passion and her purpose by
focusing on women's health and all that matters. And then Lindsay
Jefcott, whose pedigree is from a family of incredible
entrepreneurs, and she's bringing her business acumen and understanding
of governance and culture to make sure that they don't just
(35:32):
dream, but they can also do.
I see so much opportunity for you. And
Lindsay's talked about, you know, short term goals which many would think
are audacious and then long term goals which are
extraordinary. And Amy, at the same time you talking about
(35:52):
how much you still love to be a doctor. How do you align
as an organization so that you are all marching
at the same step that you can still practice your craft? You can
still feel good at the end of the day because you helped somebody. You educated
them. They got them on a preventative journey towards their health,
but also satisfy the fact that in 5 years from now,
(36:14):
there might be Lume Clinics all over Canada,
and you're spending as much time leading and managing as you used
to spend being a doctor. 1 is building a amazing
team around us. We've been very, thoughtful around our
hires in terms of marketing support, strategy
support. Actually, a lot of it has been almost on a volunteer
(36:36):
basis because so many women, with business experience
really want to support us. They've seen the lack of care that they've received or
they've experienced the lack of care and want to support us.
I think the second piece is, you know, our clinic is
6,000 square feet. We have hired upwards of 10 doctors to help
us, run Lume. And what's very obvious is
(36:58):
that most physicians who are interested in providing menopause care
still require some education. And so the opportunity to have
created almost what we call Lume University, an educational
opportunity to train other doctors, practice with other doctors,
do case discussions with other doctors has really been a fulfilling
educational, passion for myself, which really meets that sort of
(37:20):
educator, need that I'm looking for. And then we've been really
clear on boundaries once the clinic opens. We're trying to keep Mondays Fridays
business meetings because it is really important for me to provide patient care.
And so, really trying to keep clear boundaries on
when we schedule meetings so that we can have those opportunities to see
patients. So, Lindsay, I just did a documentary in the, from the manager of the
(37:43):
Tragically Hip. I also did one with Matthew Knowles, Beyonce's
dad, and both of them had a common theme that we start off
together, but there's times when we start moving
apart. In Tragically Hip, I just wanna play to a small concert. Somebody
else wanted to play big arenas. Matthew Knowles with Beyonce is, you
know, I'm the dad. I'm the manager. She's starting to get bigger. She decides she
(38:05):
wants a new manager. Things change. How do you, as the business
leader, ensure that as what is today
so exciting and new and fresh? And as Amy said, I can't wait to get
out of bed every day to be part of it. How do you keep that
alive as the business grows and become so much
bigger than your ability to get together over a glass of wine
(38:25):
on a Thursday night and solve your problems? If we get to that point,
we will be so over the moon because right now, it feels very
scrappy and start up. But to think big like that is exactly
where I'm at, Tony, and that's how I think. I think it comes down to
culture. And it's something I talk about a lot with my partners
because I've seen the growth trajectory. I've also seen the
(38:47):
contraction trajectory when companies have to lay off
stuff and and pare back and pare back teams. And
it's very challenging to create alignment and to
create that sort of that that buzz that we all have
right now and to keep it as we grow. And I think where
I'm trying to instill that value within all our employees that we
(39:10):
bring on and our doctors is through culture. And so it's creating
alignment through our purpose and then creating alignment through culture, which is very
important to me. And we have some really exciting things we're planning for
within our culture to create that. And then also as we grow within each
city, a big part of it will be training
and educating doctors across the country and also finding
(39:32):
the business partners that we're aligned with. And I feel we're really well set
up. We already have mobilized some business people within different
cities that are ready to go when we're ready. And,
and so I think once we find the like minded people in Calgary
and in Vancouver and Halifax, it will be about
getting them together. I'll probably be spending a lot more time on
(39:55):
governance and making sure we have that purpose and vision and
culture that filters down to each of the cities. So I always end
my my podcast as my 3 takeaways, and I am delighted how this
interview went because it was originally just talking about
changing health care, but it also became this wonderful story of
4 people coming together and and building something special. And I think
(40:17):
I wanna begin by saying, you know, Lindsay, I love your take on
culture and the fact that you can think big all you want, but if you
don't have a culture, you're building a business from the roof down. But if you
put your foundation in place, and I love how you put your foundation in place
in terms of the dinners and who we are and what matters to us
and then involving your family and knitting it together so that that
(40:38):
mortar is always about values. It's not about profit.
Amy, I was thrilled when you talked about no dead ends. When you talked about
health care, instead of these silos, it's imagining if if patients could
and the care could flow like water, never gets stuck. And the fact
that you're doing that and inviting people into it. And I think the last thing
is is is all of you are very different, but what's very
(41:00):
similar, I think, and what you call it luck, Lindsay, is you
came together at a time in your life where it would have been easy to
say no, and I'm I just can't deal with the bureaucracy
circumstances. Or in your case, Lindsay, I can continue to just be an investor
on the sidelines and and a governance and chair boards, all of
incredible work, but you all came together to do something special. You
(41:22):
all had a dream and collectively realizing that together
you can do it. So for all of that and more, I'm just so delighted
that you joined me on Chatted That Matters. Thank you so much, Tony. That's great
discussion. Thank you. Once again, a special
thanks to RBC for supporting Chatted That Matters. It's Tony
Chapman. Thanks for listening, and let's chat soon.
Health means the world to all of us
and more and more we're learning that health isn't something that
we leave to chance. We can take preventative actions.
We can be more responsible about what we eat, how we sleep,
exercise, the people we invite in our lives.
(00:25):
And the show today was originally gonna be about this
breakthrough in women's health, and it still is.
But interesting enough, it also involves to a story of 4
women who've come together and are building a business. And
what you'll learn is that they're building a business the right way, And these
lessons apply to anybody that dreams of being an entrepreneur, of
(00:47):
having partners. Instead of building it from the roof down and
just focusing on what it can become, they instead focused on their
foundation, their culture, and how we can knit it together. So no
matter where this business takes us, no matter how it changes
us, we're still gonna have a north star. We're gonna still be
guided by purpose over profit. And getting back to
(01:09):
health, I'm doing a lot of shows this year on longevity and health.
I had doctor Joe Coughlin, the head of MIT AgeLab, and his
match of old age is old news. And his question that he asked, the
essential question is, is a good chance you're gonna live to a 100? Are you
ready emotionally, intellectually, financially? We could
use market forces, not just social forces, and not just
(01:31):
public policies to change this narrative of old age.
You're also gonna hear from Chip Conley, the founder of the Modern Elder Academy.
A school dedicated helping people navigate midlife transitions. So
more and more of us are actually feeling, like we're
running on fumes, and we need a midlife pit stop.
Doctor Anmol Kapoor who founded Bio Aero, a company focused in
(01:54):
advanced personalized healthcare. I'm even having an architect on,
Ty Ferro, known for his innovative approach to designing buildings
that make us healthier. The spaces are created as
an accelerant for our biological, our physiological, and our
psychological health and well-being. But today,
my show focuses on women's health. More
(02:16):
specifically, a new clinic that's opening called Lume
Women + Health. It's already got an immediate wait list, and you'll
soon learn why. As the founders are using their platform,
their intellectual, their emotional capital to personalize women's
health and share everything they're doing to the rest of the
world. They're focusing on areas like menopause and sexual
(02:38):
health, bone health, and overall well-being. There are 4 founding
partners. 3 are doctors, doctor Sarah Naomi Shah,
doctor Wagoni Falati, and doctor Amy Louis-Bayliss,
and then one who brings extraordinary entrepreneurial and business
acumen, Lindsay Jefkot. And today, I'm gonna speak to 2 of
them, doctor Amy Louis-Bayliss and then Lindsay Jepchott. And you're
(03:00):
gonna get a masterclass in building a business and
also getting an appreciation for what healthcare can be
if we let it happen.
It's Tony Chapman. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcast. A big shout out
to RBC for not only sponsoring chatter That Matters, but for all
(03:20):
they're doing to invest in healthcare workers and healthcare across
Canada.
Lindsay and Amy, welcome to A Chatter That Matters. Thank you for having
us. We're super excited to be here. Amy, I wanna begin by having
a better understanding of why medicine has become your passion and
(03:41):
why you're so passionate about personalizing it so
women can get the health care they deserve. I come from a health care family.
My father is a surgeon. My mother is a nurse. And so growing up, I
was always exposed to the idea of helping people
and the job satisfaction, that my parents both had.
I gravitated towards the sciences. And then when I was doing my
(04:04):
undergrad actually at McMaster University, I got a job working as a
clerk in the emergency department and that was really my first exposure
face to face to health care. And to say I was enthralled,
like, really invested in what the
emergency room looked like would be an understatement. I
(04:25):
love the idea of seeing teams work together to provide care.
I love the ability to quickly help someone, and then I like the
diversity. Like, when I was doing, you know, as time went on and I was
doing cardiology and then obstetrics and then gynecology and pediatrics,
I loved how everything came to the emergency department. So that's really
what inspired my interest in certainly applying
(04:48):
to medical school and definitely my initial career choice in emergency
medicine. Most of us are voyeurs. We turn on the television set, and
we get swept up in these shows about the emergency room.
I'm just curious as how close to reality are they
versus what you experienced both as an intern and obviously inside your
career when you actually started practicing medicine? So you have to understand, I've been
(05:10):
doing this now for 20 years, and what emergency medicine has looked
like from 20 years ago to today with COVID,
with, lack of primary care availability, with
wait times is very, very different. But, yeah, certainly, when
I started, it was it was incredible in terms
of every case I saw was extremely exciting. The
(05:32):
ability in my early twenties to put stitches in and correct
a broken bone and manage a motor vehicle collision,
was very exciting. Certainly, as time goes on, you
see that the excitement that you might see on TV probably takes
up about 5 to 10% of what you're actually seeing in
emergency medicine. And a lot of emergency medicine is
(05:55):
setting expectations for patients and educating them around why they came to
emergency in the first place. It's, you know, it's
hard navigating our healthcare system right now, and
patients are at a breaking point where they just wanna go to emergency and, you
know, figure out what's going on. And so setting expectations about what you
can and can't do, within the scope of emergency,
(06:18):
has become really more of the focus of certainly what it looks
like. A sidebar question because I've been reading a lot on this
sort of supply and demand, and we're at this crisis point in health care. But
I'm sensing you're saying is that there's a lot of times when you don't
need to go to an emergency room. What we're doing is we're stretching
these finite resources across what's almost seems like
(06:40):
infinite demand. So is it part of the answer educating people
more so that they know when to go and when they should be thinking
about other areas to find peace of mind or to find some kind
of answer to what's ailing them. Yeah. I mean, when I think a lot actually
about the emergency medicine experience that most patients
face today, which could be an 8, 10 hour wait, can
(07:04):
be actually very draining, especially if it's 2, 3 in the morning.
And I I actually think that there's a few things contributing to it. First
of all, we are now in a stage where information is
available to everyone at the drop of a hat. You can look up,
you can Google, you can social media check any kind of
information, and I think we have a society that is looking for rapid
(07:26):
answers. And so when you have symptoms, when you
have chest pain or abdominal pain, this feeling of needing to
address it immediately, I think, is pushing a lot of people to the emergency
department. It's also really hard to get ahold of your family doctor these
days. I mean, I am a physician, and even navigating care for my own
kids can take 20, 30 minutes waiting on a phone call
(07:47):
waiting for someone to pick up the phone. It can take 3, 4 weeks for
me to get in to see my physician. And then the third piece is is
because the emergency department is so overwhelmed, we also don't have the
resources to manage the flow put of these patients. So, you
know, if you require blood work, if you require an ultrasound, there's no
capacity in the hospital to be able to manage that journey in a quick
(08:09):
way, and we're lacking hospital beds. So a lot of the emergency
department is actually filled with patients that are waiting for a spot
inside the hospital, and that really delays the ability to
actually manage patient flow. So I wanna talk about those experiences
and how it's led to you to what you're doing today, but I also wanna
talk about a life changing lecture on menopause. I think it was doctor Natalie
(08:31):
Gamache, and it was one of those times in life
where it opened up a new path for you. I think in order
to speak to the relevance of lecture with Natalie Gamache, you
have to understand a little bit about where I was when I saw that lecture.
So I had just we had just navigated being an emergency physician through
COVID. And 2 of the pieces
(08:54):
of being an ER physician during COVID that really changed
my passion, into the preventative health space was,
1, I dealt with frailty. I dealt with,
I dealt with nursing homes. I dealt with caregiver burnout. I dealt
with navigating home care in a way I had never navigated before
for a couple of reasons. For a long time, the elderly actually weren't allowed
(09:17):
to bring an advocate in with them to emergency. So when the
emerge was on lockdown, you know, in order to even see a
patient and understand why they were there required multiple phone calls on my
end. And I think I got an inner look at what
the nursing home situations were. I was able to get an inner look of what
frailty really looked like in a way that I didn't understand before.
(09:39):
And it really led me to see how much end of
life care, even the last 5, 10, 15 years of your
life, are impacted by your health. Like, the ability to
make independent decisions, the ability to be physically
capable, and mentally fit just became so
glaringly obvious that that I wanted to do better. And then the
(10:01):
second piece was all the primary care that I saw in emergency.
So, a lot of patients started coming to emerge because they wanted to be examined.
We've really switched over to had switched over to a virtual care model at that
point. And so I started managing heavy periods, started
managing blood pressure problem, started managing mental health,
and things that were really should have been in the hands of the primary care
(10:21):
physician. And I saw that there was a big gap in
medical literacy and health literacy among the patients that I was seeing,
And I thought if we could get in front of these patients, if we could
educate them, ahead of the disease experience, maybe
we could have an impact. And so I had already
started this preventative health education journey. I have been a
(10:43):
faculty lead for a very long time. I help run residency, like,
education programs, and the reason why I went to this Natalie
Gamache lecture was it was a lecture on menopause, and I thought, you know what?
I don't know much about this. I'm gonna attend this lecture,
and the lecture basically covered a couple of things. One
was it spoke about this trial that happened, started
(11:04):
in 1998, ended in 2002 called the Women's Health Initiative,
and this trial really was the nidus for women coming off of hormone
therapy. So in the nineties, hormone therapy was the most prescribed
medication for women in the world, and even today, less than 2% of
Canadian women are using hormone therapy. And that
really led to the type of education I had, which was menopause is the end
(11:27):
of the period and there's nothing we can do about. And doctor
Kamash really debunked that myth. She went over this trial. She went
over actually the benefits that had been shown in the trial, and I remember
her saying that the results of this trial was the biggest mistake
in modern day medicine that had been made by the medical community.
And I saw it I listened to this lecture, and I thought to myself, wow.
(11:49):
I had no idea how much menopause impacts a risk of disease for
women. I had no idea how it impacted your risk for osteoporosis,
heart disease, and dementia. And I thought, if I'm a faculty leader
and I'm, like, providing this educational platform and I don't know this, then
I'm pretty sure no one else does. And so I saw this really as an
educational opportunity for me, to be able to
(12:12):
shed light on this to the public and and with my patients. Where
do you get your passion? Because a lot of people I've talked in the health
care community get to the point where they just burn out. They feel
there's this the status quo is so locked in. It's impossible
to change. But you come out of these 20 years of experience in
ER. You come out of this the pandemic. You come up with all
(12:34):
these circumstances that are just almost feel impossible to move
and then this lecture and from all of this, you decide, in fact,
we are gonna make a change. We're gonna do something different. Why do you think
you're wired that way? And I don't mean this to be disparaging to other people
to just sort of say I can't do this anymore, but you decided
to dream bigger when you created Lume Woman in Health with
(12:57):
with 2 other physicians. So I'd like to say that this was just like I
had all the energy and I just do did it, but it was a journey.
So, I was struggling with what emergency had
become in terms of the opportunity to teach in terms of
feeling like it was really becoming a place where I was pushing
patients through and not having those opportunities to really provide
(13:18):
that health literacy. And but I also struggled with feeling like
a failure for wanting a career change. So, really, the transition did
involve a lot of therapy, and involved really some coaching
on I really truly believe in my heart of hearts that I'm a physician
and that I was really meant to be an educator and use my
medical platform to provide education. And so I
(13:41):
was really through the work of coaching and therapy of saying, like, how do I
change this? How do I still feel fulfilled? How do I still stay true to
my values, but, you know, make it look different? It
involved applying to the College of Physicians and Surgeons. It involved creating a 1
year retraining program to be able to do this. So it
did definitely require staying true to my values. It definitely
(14:02):
required, some emotional support and some therapy
for sure. But I look back at the last 3 years, and
I wake up every day so fulfilled right now. I'm just
so so so happy that I pushed through really
wanting to have a career that sort of met my needs and my
passion. So talk to me about how this played at home because you, you know,
(14:24):
you go into medicine, which must have made your this family of
physicians quite happy. You start sharing those early days and they must
have sort of smiled remembering their early days. But as you
move along and you start understanding the
realities of today, which must be very different than what your family had
gone through in in medicine, and then you come to this point in
(14:46):
life where you wanna change, how did that play out? Were they supportive? Were they
encouraging? Were they questioning the fact that you were trying to
change something that seemed impossible to change? I would say that my family
was probably the most supportive of all, and I think part of it was
that I didn't sort of quit medicine.
You know, I really repivoted to find fulfillment. And, you know,
(15:09):
towards the end of my emergency career, I was miserable. I
wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing. I had trouble sleeping. I had a
lot of anxiety leading up to my shift leading up to, like, doing an
emerge shift. And so I think they saw the fulfillment
and the passion and the excitement
that was renewed in me in in choosing another path. I
(15:31):
did really struggle and still struggle with this feeling of having left my
ER call ER emergency medicine colleagues behind. Because emergency is
a really tough job and it it's required. Like, we have to have emergency
medicine services for, you know, public health care to
work. And so I think that's probably the one area where
I feel maybe not actually when you talk to my
(15:53):
colleagues, they actually say, like, they admire me, but I
still think I struggle with having let them down or having left them. Lindsay, we're
gonna bring you into the show in a minute. But before we do, it wasn't
just your vision. You had to convince doctor Filate. You had
to convince doctor Sarah Naomi Shaw and doctor
Woganee Filate to also join you. I mean, that's
(16:16):
3 people with 3 very different stages in a life coming
together to form Lume, Woman, + Health. And the truth is is we actually
didn't know each other before. So I think there's this perception that we were all
lifelong friends and we decided to do this, but this was really a business
relationship. It's serendipity, honestly.
I had been thinking about opening my own clinic for actually a couple
(16:38):
of years. I've been in the menopause space for a while now, and
I actually sent Wagonee the Natalie Gamache lecture,
if you can believe it. She was a sleep physician. She had been practicing
sleep for almost 20 years, and she was seeing all these midlife
women who were coming in to be tested for sleep apnea, and they were
okay, but still couldn't sleep. And when she saw this lecture
(17:00):
and saw how menopause impacts your risk of sleep, she thought, holy
shoot. I'm missing this big opportunity to
educate around menopause that I was blindsided around and didn't
have the opportunity to learn about. And the same with Sarah. Sarah
has a background in psychology. She was a woman, she
was she specialized in women's health and psychology at at Harvard
(17:23):
actually before going into medicine and always had this interest in
women's health. She's a woman in her early fifties also going through the
menopause transition, and I think it was serendipitous in
that we were all kind of at that 15, 20 year itch in our career.
We all saw the discrepancies that were happening in
the health care system from a different angle, and we're all passionate about making a
(17:46):
different change.
So, Lindsay, you're the connective tissue from the business side of doing business.
You've got 3 practitioners all coming with a with their
strength, practicing their craft. How do you play a role
in this in terms of where you have influence and where you have authority in
terms of creating Lume Women in Health? Because there has to be a business
(18:08):
model, and there also has to be a model where your head in terms of
the the medicine you're practicing, but also the heart. In terms of how
I and what I bring to the to the journey into Lumen Human
Health, I think it's important to understand my background. So I came from I
come from a very entrepreneurial family. I had a
great grandfather who started, a haberdasher at Bloor and Young
(18:30):
on with the back of his shirt for a $1,000, and it was
there until 2014, actually, when we sold it. So it
was Staleries. And then my great grandfather my grandfather was a mining
engineer, and he staked one of the biggest uranium deposits
in the world, super successful in the mining business. And then my
dad went west and became an oil and gas entrepreneur. And
(18:52):
so, it was in my blood to sort of
do startups and be entrepreneurial. And from a
little from as little as, like, 5 years old, I remember watching
deals happen over napkins and hearing, you know,
being part of board meetings as a child and, like, just listening to it. And
so I think some families talk about, you know, politics and
(19:16):
world events, and we just always talked about business. And it was different
deals and different, industries, but always,
talking about partnerships. And I saw partnerships happening at the dining room table.
And so when it came to be that I met these women, you know,
fortuitously 2 years ago, we were all at a stage in our journeys where we
(19:36):
were ready for the next step. And I'd had the
benefit of having 15 years of investing with partners.
And we'd spent the time, and we curated, our own vision
collectively, the 4 of us, before we took the next step. We actually took the
time to understand, our passions and
our goals and our partners in
(19:57):
life and our families. And so I think spending that time is something
most people don't do. But then when we got into it, you know,
obviously, I came with more of the business side of things.
So I've had a lot of experience raising money, for example. I've had
a lot of experience, from a governance perspective. I've chaired
boards. I've sat on many boards. And in terms of strategic,
(20:20):
introductions from the business community, that's been, what I've brought to
the table, raising debt and equity, as I mentioned, and then
also philanthropy. So I've had a history in philanthropy.
And really, when I learned about the doctors and their
vision for philanthropy with this company, which is
very big and and wonderful, I learned that it was really a
(20:43):
marriage of my two passions. It was, okay, we're gonna be philanthropic, and we're
gonna have this huge giveback, which I'm very, passionate about. But
also, we're gonna create this this business, this private business. There's a
lot of people that start businesses, and the partners are
have very different skill sets. They have very different
ambitions. And often, they fail because there there isn't this connective
(21:05):
tissue. They don't have a common language, a common vernacular. Their values
aren't together. I want you to unpack a little bit about what you
did to ensure that the 4 you could have conversations, and
it wasn't about your resume or your skill set. It was about
what matters for the business and what matters for the patients we're serving. I think
to begin with, we made sure that we all had the
(21:27):
same value system. So sitting around the table, I
made everyone come to the first dinner with a list of questions that they'd answered.
And this was, you know, before we'd even taken
any money, signed any agreements. It was literally just the 4 of
us sitting at dinner, and we went around the table and we talked about our
life stories, and we talked about our goals and our
(21:49):
values. And so to make sure we had the same values. And then,
obviously, we're all we have different skill sets as you pointed out. I think we
we complement each other very well with those different skill sets without
really, to be honest, without really having thought through our personality
types. We actually balance ourselves out really well from a personality
perspective. So we've we've figured that out as well as we've gone on, and
(22:11):
I think that was just luck. I think there's a big part of
this that is luck, to be honest. But making sure, you know, as
we're doing the business plan, I have worked on boards and I understand
how to get consensus. And consensus is really important. And when
there's not consensus, trying to find a middle ground and trying
to find, a way to have everyone's voices heard
(22:34):
in a way that everyone feels, supported. At the beginning, you know, it's
all that I mean, the blooms on the rose. This is gonna be just we
are gonna change medicine, but as the realities of the business take
hold, Personalities do emerge. How do you as an
organization, I'll put it out to both you and and Amy, who
has influence and who has authority? Because there's gonna be times where decisions
(22:55):
have to be made and consensus might not be
realized. And consensus won't be realized, and we understand that. We have a
really comprehensive shareholders agreement as as most businesses
do. And, we have an understanding that we have
a voting structure that we adhere to. So, of course, we'll go to that route
if we have to. 2 of the pieces that we really made sure to build
(23:16):
in was 1, when we started, it was like, what do you want
the rest of your career to look like? I mean, we're not just starting. We've
all had about a 20 year career ahead of us. But but sorry. A 20
year career behind us. So how do we make sure we're incorporating
our dream careers going forward? We have 12 kids between the 4 of
us. We both had all have busy husbands who also have,
(23:38):
like, hardworking jobs. And so how do we make sure we structure this
company that really keeps what our dreams are in mind? And
then the second piece is for anyone who's had a deal breaker, and we've
had a couple of instances where there's been one person who felt,
you know, passionately about not making a move in this direction or
not. We've been respectable respectful of that. And I
(24:00):
think once again that comes with the maturity of having been in this for a
long time. We stop, we listen, we reflect, and go from
there. You mentioned that, you know, the family side of the business, the husbands and
the kids. I think they're part of the whole conversation
too because anytime you're starting a business, there's compromises that have to
be made. There's support that has to be earned. There's kids
(24:22):
that are they're gonna might not see as much as they used to because you're
in the startup phase. How did you bring your partners on board so
that they're part of the dream versus just cheering you from the
sideline? Our husbands are amazing, amazing supportive
partners. And so the second step, I think I mentioned we went for dinner and
we sort of got our alignment and took the next step, and the next step
(24:44):
was sitting down with the husbands. And so we took the time to get to
know each other's husbands and to make sure that they
were engaged in this process and they feel supportive. They're also,
from the sides cheering us on every step of the way. So we feel
really lucky that we've come into not only this great partnership of
women with balancing skills, but also for
(25:05):
husbands who also have balancing skills and who are terrifically
supportive. Another bonding, if my research is right, is you
this collaborative effort about It's Our Time Canada. And I want
you to talk about that because sometimes having a north star that extends
beyond your business is an incredible way to create
this commonality that we're in it together. So talk to me about what
(25:28):
It's Our Time Canada is all about, and why do you think it was
instrumental in the early days of of really establishing Lume Women in
Health? A couple of years ago, I started retraining in,
providing women's health care and mature women's health care, which
included menopause care. And in
what I was seeing out there in terms of the ability
(25:51):
in terms of, like, social media, in terms of presentations, in terms of
thought leadership, was really invested in the United States
and in the UK. I didn't really see that there was a lot of thought
leadership happening on a social media scale, on a public
scale. I mean, there are incredible thought leaders in the menopause space in
Canada. But I really saw this as an opportunity for a couple of reasons.
(26:13):
One is there's so much misinformation out there, when it
comes to menopause, menopause myths. But the second piece is our
Canadian health care system is different. And trying to
find a provider that provides menopause care is very difficult in Canada.
And so Sarah Wogany and I came together and thought, how do
we help empower women with the knowledge that they
(26:35):
need to navigate the health care system? This is not something that's
probably going to happen on its own. Your doctor is very
unlikely to sit down and talk to you about your sex life as you
age, talk to you about menopause as you age because it it's not built into
the curriculum. So women are going to have to advocate for themselves in
Canada, and in order to do that, you need to be health literate. So how
(26:56):
do we provide women with the tools? And I wanted this to be for every
woman. I didn't want this to be for only women that could pay or women
that were privileged. And so it's our time Canada was really
born out of how do we give women the skills to navigate this health care
system and how does this access everyone. And, Lindsay, you talked about your
philanthropy that there's a side about giving back because from the
(27:18):
outside, you could say, well, you're privatizing health care. And that
immediately attracts a side of media that goes, that's wrong.
We're we're universal health care. So talk to me about
what you're doing to build on what Amy just said in the sense that the
information we learn, the the things that we uncover is for everyone, not just
for our bottom line. The purpose is really what one of the
(27:40):
values that kept us together, as I mentioned, and the purpose
being creating a change in the system. We've written a white paper to
the House of Commons to make sure that, that our voice
is heard at the table. We want to change, so that there's a billing
code for menopause. There currently isn't one right now. And that there's
mandatory education in med school. So there's there's several things that we're doing from
(28:03):
a charitable give back piece. Our
clinic believes that for women in midlife, we
benefit from a proactive approach to healthy aging and wellness,
which includes care that might not be covered by the OHIP system. And as
such, we've developed program offerings that combine certain OHIP funded
care where appropriate. So certain types of menopausal symptoms and
(28:25):
sexual dysfunction would be considered within OHIP, but then the non
OHIP function would be, coaching, health goal
setting, some allied professionals, and more the wellness and prevention
side. But we believe that's an important component to properly,
dealing with a woman in med midlife for her health care. The other piece that
I just wanted to add is, like I said, I provide menopause
(28:47):
care in the OHIP system right now, and these women need me.
They need physicians to help them. And so as part of
launching Lume, we've actually created a partnership with Mount Sinai.
And so every physician that works at Lume is also going to be
providing menopause care at the Sinai Mature Women's Health Center,
and that will be completely under the OHIP system. So once again,
(29:10):
this belief in, you know, accessibility for women,
and that strong value system is actually already built into even
our clinic model. It's interesting. You know, I started talking
about revolutionizing health care, but this is also a case study in small
business because my next question would be, you're really focused
on menopause, but women's health extends way
(29:33):
beyond menopause. What else do you think you're gonna be able to do
with this model of let's practice our craft, let's create
this intellectual and emotional currency, and then share it to
Canada, if not the world. We've tried to be as innovative and pause
as possible and really understanding what women need. So with the
menopause program, it is built in there's built in proactive
(29:56):
preventive health component. There's a medical literacy and health
literacy and education component. We've developed a sexual health
model that is a doctor paired with a pelvic physio
because what we find right now is care is so siloed. You go, you see
your naturopath. You go, you see your pelvic physio. You see your psychotherapist. You see
your doctor, but no one talks to each other. So how do we create a
(30:17):
model for women which, a, saves them time, and, b, allows for
communications across allied health providers? I
am so passionate about preventive health care, and what
women don't tend to understand is that the illnesses that kill
women, heart disease, dementia, a fracture from
osteoporosis, These diseases take 10, 20, 30 years to
(30:39):
set up. These diseases are starting in your late thirties and your early forties. So
how do I empower women to understand what their health looks like right
now? What does it mean if your health looks like this at 45?
This is what it's gonna look like at 85, and can I help you create
health goals? And we can measure this on an annual basis.
And all of that, like, proactive preventative health is not built
(31:01):
into the current health care system. This is not paid for by OHIP. OHIP pays
once you have disease. Lindsey, does the sort of the entrepreneur in
this business, when you listen to this and I'm hearing this, there must be so
many different ways that you could scale what Lume is
doing, education. It could be products. It could be services.
What are your plans for this business going forward so that you
(31:24):
continue to have this north star of reinventing health care, putting
the patient at the center, but at the same time, capitalizing on the
opportunity? We're not just menopause. We're all things women's health.
And our North Star is really, to create change, to
galvanize that change within the system, but then also we'd like to be
the women's health, expert across Canada. So
(31:47):
we'd like to be opening centers all across Canada, every major
city, and, into the US as well.
We've also talked, you know, the big, big goals that are not
achievable within 1 to 5, but maybe 1 to 10. We've talked
about, Lume teen. There's a lack of access to period
care and contraceptive tier care for adolescents, so
(32:09):
that's another big lofty goal of ours. We'd like to have a
research foundation. As we see so many women coming through the clinic, there's a real
opportunity to create and gather research from the women that we're as we see so
many women coming through the clinic, there's a real opportunity to create and gather research
from the women that we're seeing and to be able to have a bigger give
give back from that component. So I think menopause the impact of
menopause in the workplace is also becoming very, very,
(32:32):
clear. There was a report that came out last year, by the Menopause
Foundation of Canada that showed that days off work,
symptoms related to menopause impact the Canadian
economy, with by with the
cost the Canadian economy $3,500,000,000 a year.
Like, this is a staggering number and so another area
(32:54):
that we focused on is how do we work with businesses, and
provide menopause support to their female employees, but also
provide education in the workplace. When we
return, I asked Amy and Lindsay a tough question. What
happens if they grow so fast that they lose everything
they believe in in terms of Lume woman and health? That they become
(33:17):
managers versus practitioners. And a big shout out to RBC for not
only sponsoring stories about positivity and possibility,
but all RBC is doing to support health care and health care workers
across Canada. Hi. This is Tony Chapman. I
wanna talk to you about what RBC Wealth Management is doing to support healthy
aging. Old age is becoming old news. We're living longer,
(33:39):
and planning for our future means we need to integrate health, wellness,
and our financial matters. RBC Wealth Management is partnering with
leading experts and organizations like the MIT Age Lab, the
National Institute on Aging, the Women's Brain Health Initiative, Elder
Caring, and the Women's Age Lab. Why? To provide you with
comprehensive resources covering every aspect of you aging
(34:02):
well. This includes support for your physical and mental health, caregiving,
maintaining financial stability, and preparing for later life health
issues, ensuring you can age safely and comfortably, and ideally
in your own home. With RBC Wealth Management, you create a personalized
plan that adapts as your needs change, giving you peace of mind and
security. Visit rbcwealthmanagement.com
(34:25):
and learn more about healthy aging and start planning for your future.
Healthy aging, well, that matters to you, to me, and to
RBC. Hi, everyone. Today, I wanna talk about
the impact of alcohol on your sleep. So this is a reminder
to book a mammogram if you need one, especially if you're
between the ages of 40 to 49. Hi,
(34:48):
everyone. Today, I wanna talk about the importance of sleep
hygiene. I wanted to remind everyone today about the role of
hormone testing to decide whether or not you are in
menopause. Joining me today are 2 extraordinary
women and 2 of the 4 founders of Lume Women + Health.
The first is doctor Amy Louis-Bayliss who almost quit medicine
(35:10):
after 20 years of dealing with the frustrations and circumstances
and instead reclaimed her passion and her purpose by
focusing on women's health and all that matters. And then Lindsay
Jefcott, whose pedigree is from a family of incredible
entrepreneurs, and she's bringing her business acumen and understanding
of governance and culture to make sure that they don't just
(35:32):
dream, but they can also do.
I see so much opportunity for you. And
Lindsay's talked about, you know, short term goals which many would think
are audacious and then long term goals which are
extraordinary. And Amy, at the same time you talking about
(35:52):
how much you still love to be a doctor. How do you align
as an organization so that you are all marching
at the same step that you can still practice your craft? You can
still feel good at the end of the day because you helped somebody. You educated
them. They got them on a preventative journey towards their health,
but also satisfy the fact that in 5 years from now,
(36:14):
there might be Lume Clinics all over Canada,
and you're spending as much time leading and managing as you used
to spend being a doctor. 1 is building a amazing
team around us. We've been very, thoughtful around our
hires in terms of marketing support, strategy
support. Actually, a lot of it has been almost on a volunteer
(36:36):
basis because so many women, with business experience
really want to support us. They've seen the lack of care that they've received or
they've experienced the lack of care and want to support us.
I think the second piece is, you know, our clinic is
6,000 square feet. We have hired upwards of 10 doctors to help
us, run Lume. And what's very obvious is
(36:58):
that most physicians who are interested in providing menopause care
still require some education. And so the opportunity to have
created almost what we call Lume University, an educational
opportunity to train other doctors, practice with other doctors,
do case discussions with other doctors has really been a fulfilling
educational, passion for myself, which really meets that sort of
(37:20):
educator, need that I'm looking for. And then we've been really
clear on boundaries once the clinic opens. We're trying to keep Mondays Fridays
business meetings because it is really important for me to provide patient care.
And so, really trying to keep clear boundaries on
when we schedule meetings so that we can have those opportunities to see
patients. So, Lindsay, I just did a documentary in the, from the manager of the
(37:43):
Tragically Hip. I also did one with Matthew Knowles, Beyonce's
dad, and both of them had a common theme that we start off
together, but there's times when we start moving
apart. In Tragically Hip, I just wanna play to a small concert. Somebody
else wanted to play big arenas. Matthew Knowles with Beyonce is, you
know, I'm the dad. I'm the manager. She's starting to get bigger. She decides she
(38:05):
wants a new manager. Things change. How do you, as the business
leader, ensure that as what is today
so exciting and new and fresh? And as Amy said, I can't wait to get
out of bed every day to be part of it. How do you keep that
alive as the business grows and become so much
bigger than your ability to get together over a glass of wine
(38:25):
on a Thursday night and solve your problems? If we get to that point,
we will be so over the moon because right now, it feels very
scrappy and start up. But to think big like that is exactly
where I'm at, Tony, and that's how I think. I think it comes down to
culture. And it's something I talk about a lot with my partners
because I've seen the growth trajectory. I've also seen the
(38:47):
contraction trajectory when companies have to lay off
stuff and and pare back and pare back teams. And
it's very challenging to create alignment and to
create that sort of that that buzz that we all have
right now and to keep it as we grow. And I think where
I'm trying to instill that value within all our employees that we
(39:10):
bring on and our doctors is through culture. And so it's creating
alignment through our purpose and then creating alignment through culture, which is very
important to me. And we have some really exciting things we're planning for
within our culture to create that. And then also as we grow within each
city, a big part of it will be training
and educating doctors across the country and also finding
(39:32):
the business partners that we're aligned with. And I feel we're really well set
up. We already have mobilized some business people within different
cities that are ready to go when we're ready. And,
and so I think once we find the like minded people in Calgary
and in Vancouver and Halifax, it will be about
getting them together. I'll probably be spending a lot more time on
(39:55):
governance and making sure we have that purpose and vision and
culture that filters down to each of the cities. So I always end
my my podcast as my 3 takeaways, and I am delighted how this
interview went because it was originally just talking about
changing health care, but it also became this wonderful story of
4 people coming together and and building something special. And I think
(40:17):
I wanna begin by saying, you know, Lindsay, I love your take on
culture and the fact that you can think big all you want, but if you
don't have a culture, you're building a business from the roof down. But if you
put your foundation in place, and I love how you put your foundation in place
in terms of the dinners and who we are and what matters to us
and then involving your family and knitting it together so that that
(40:38):
mortar is always about values. It's not about profit.
Amy, I was thrilled when you talked about no dead ends. When you talked about
health care, instead of these silos, it's imagining if if patients could
and the care could flow like water, never gets stuck. And the fact
that you're doing that and inviting people into it. And I think the last thing
is is is all of you are very different, but what's very
(41:00):
similar, I think, and what you call it luck, Lindsay, is you
came together at a time in your life where it would have been easy to
say no, and I'm I just can't deal with the bureaucracy
circumstances. Or in your case, Lindsay, I can continue to just be an investor
on the sidelines and and a governance and chair boards, all of
incredible work, but you all came together to do something special. You
(41:22):
all had a dream and collectively realizing that together
you can do it. So for all of that and more, I'm just so delighted
that you joined me on Chatted That Matters. Thank you so much, Tony. That's great
discussion. Thank you. Once again, a special
thanks to RBC for supporting Chatted That Matters. It's Tony
Chapman. Thanks for listening, and let's chat soon.
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