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Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Dr. Kimon Angelides, Executive Chairman and CEO of FemTec Health, a health and beauty sciences company, dedicated to innovating the women’s healthcare industry.
Our overall goal is to understand how technology is radically changing healthcare: the way we screentreat and measure progress and outcomes. How we’re empowering the consumer. Whether we’re creating productivity that drives economic costs down? And how tech advancements change the role of the doctor.
Highlights from the interview:
- Angelides has been in the digital healthcare space for at least 15 years and has launched seven successful digital health companies. His career started when he realized that there was a much better way to help patients than bringing them in then they’re sick, and instead having care in between visits to better understand problems and be able to reach out to patients. His first company was a network of diabetes centers called Diabetes America, which evolved to digital health so that it could reach more people, and that was the genesis of Livongo.
- FemTec Health is not centered around reproductive health but instead has created an ecosystem of both products and services for women, irrespective of their life stage or age. The mission is to revolutionize women’s health care, so they have a single destination and to create a personalized ecosystem that’s driven by data and that creates a whole experience and a continuum of personalized services.
- The company has a direct-to-consumer product it recently launched, and that consists of products including probiotic supplements, diagnostic tests, telemedicine, and prescriptions. It has also started a B2B product as well, much like Livongo, when Agelidies went to employers where it could actually provide them a good return on an investment and provide a service to the women employees.
- There’s been a change in the way the medical community views women’s health, and that you can’t just take men’s health and just translate it to women. Clinical studies for women were only started to be included in 1993, so most of what we know about medicine is really on, on males. The realizatio is that we need to start to pay a lot more attention to this special requirements and needs of women, which is just beginning right now.
- Most femtech companies are founded by women, so Angelidies realized his own limitations and surrounded himself by incredibly strong women who have been building the team and we are building the product. His forte is to try to bring the structural elements and for the women on the team to be able to express themselves in the sense of building something which is female and women-centric.
- FemTec Health has sought a homogeneous standard of care in that there are particular things that these primary care physicians need to know and need to provide in terms of services. The company is also in the process of building a specialty network, which would be in fetal maternal medicine and some other high risk pregnancies.
- The company bought Birchbox, which is a beauty company, because FemTec believes beauty is part of prevention. If someone looks good, or they feel that they look good, they actually do better in terms of the wellness, in terms of the perception, and the psychometrics. It’s not selling cosmetics: it’s known for many women who have menopause, they have very dry skin, and there’s also vaginal dryness, and so it has proprietary formulas for lotions that match that woman’s particular journey.
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