Taking Flight © lynette sheppard
As promised, here is Part II of my interview with Evernow CEO, Alicia Jackson. As I mentioned in the previous post – this is the future of healthcare for menopausal women. Read on for more on this revolutionary telehealth option.
Menopause Goddess Blog:
I constantly hear from women that their practitioners don’t offer helpful solutions for troubling symptoms such as brain fog, fatigue, insomnia. How might Evernow approach these problems along with the more common complaints of hot flashes, night sweats, and vaginal dryness?
Alicia Jackson:
When women rank their most troubling symptoms, often they list hot flashes and vaginal issues. But the others are important as well. Fatigue, sleep disturbances, and brain fog affects 30% of women. These are huge disruptors in quality of life. If a woman suffers those symptoms, we at Evernow absolutely do our best to take care of her.
Menopause Goddess Blog:
Great. I think that’s really heartening. Definitely. Though I have to say, those numbers that you give me seem a little low, at least anecdotally, in terms of how many women have fatigue, insomnia, and brain fog; I think the reporting might be low based not only on our original menopause goddess group, but hosting the menopause blog for 15 years and having sent out surveys, I think it’s probably a little more prevalent than 30%.
Alicia Jackson:
It could also be we have a biased sample because these are the people who are so frustrated, they’ve sought out Evernow. We were actually surprised at how high it was.
Menopause Goddess Blog:
Yes. I think it’s higher. I would say that if we used our original menopause goddess group of 15 women as a representative sample, we came from all over the U S and all different walks of life, blue color to CEOs and all in between. I would say emotional symptoms afflicted a couple of them, but in terms of brain fog, I would say 80% of the women had brain fog. 80% had insomnia until they got something that worked for it.
Alicia Jackson:
Insomnia is the thing I hear so much about from everyone. And you’re right. I almost wonder if some women don’t even realize it’s brain fog when they can’t remember a word or they can’t focus. A friend of mine runs a huge biotech company and before she got on the patch, she said she couldn’t focus on anything. It was as if, suddenly she couldn’t do her job anymore.
Menopause Goddess Blog:
Right. Oh, absolutely. I have women who’ve been right in the middle of doing their graduate degree theses and they didn’t think they were going to get through it. Their brains didn’t work anymore. Luckily I could say with some authority, I’m sorry about that. It sucks. It will get better.
I think you’ve alluded to this, but one of the things I’ve learned from our group is that every woman’s transition and experience of menopause is different. Actually even her experience may change over time. Which is a little shocking. You find something that works, it works for six months and then suddenly nothing works anymore. And the symptoms, come back. So how do you think Evernow will tailor approaches to women with that in mind?
Alicia Jackson:
Yes, this is the thing I alluded to earlier that I’m so excited about. Right now, when you go to see your medical provider for menopause, that person’s experience is limited to their training and the patients that they’ve seen before seeing you — probably a few hundred people. But we’ve had 10,000 women come through and fill out a medical intake. And what that means is that every one of the medical providers on our platform can leverage our technology to look at our data, see what the symptoms are, and find out how our women are responding to treatment. They now have this experience of 10,000 women, all of whom are subtly different from one another.
With this beautiful collage of 10,000 women, we can find commonalities in experience and treatment. I don’t want to over-promise right now. We’re just at the beginning of this. Yet we can already predict what’s going to be the best medication for each woman. Obviously the medical provider makes the decision in conversation with the woman going through the platform based on her own goals and what she wants to take or doesn’t want to take. But we have a powerful tool to help support that process.
We can even track women over time and understand how their symptoms are evolving. They self-report side effects, symptoms, how their symptoms are changing, and any other health conditions that are popping up or down. With this information, we can tailor something personalized to each woman. Our near-term goal is to be at a point where the woman comes in and we know not only what a great treatment protocol will be for each individual woman, but also how that treatment should evolve over time. That’s exciting because it opens up opportunities for us to deliver a better medical experience than you can get from an in person provider today. It’s revolutionary.
Menopause Goddess Blog:
You said practitioners. You have MDs on the site. Do you have any other professionals, like nurse practitioners?
Alicia Jackson:
We have a number of phenomenal nurse practitioners on the platform. All our practitioners are focused on working with the patient. Instead of saying “I know what the right answer is” s/he will say “Here’s some options, let’s discuss them.”
By the way, here’s a little vignette that I think everybody was really surprised about. We all believed that women would only want to do video consults. What we’ve actually learned is that most women love being able to just text us when they have a free moment and communicate with us that way. We’ve had so many women tell us they have a better relationship with us than they do with their in-person provider. It’s gratifying to be able to provide that level of service and care.
It really shouldn’t be that surprising. Many of us text back and forth with our family members, our moms, our sisters, our daughters — and it feels like they’re right there. It’s very convenient and responsive. That’s our number one goal, to be responsive to women and to meet them where they are.
That’s the end of part II. I’ll post part III of our interview soon – in the meantime, you can visit the Evernow site and learn more here: evernow.co
Full disclosure: I have been compensated for this post. However, as most of you know, I don’t accept compensation for anything unless I whole-heartedly believe in it as a help for menopausal women. That’s why we don’t have any ads here.
