The Stretch – Beyond Reproductive Health: Employee Benefits for Women

The Stretch – Beyond Reproductive Health: Employee Benefits for Women
August 12, 2024 15 mins

The Stretch – Beyond Reproductive Health: Employee Benefits for Women

Season 1 Episode 1: Aon host, Kevin Fyock, discusses how women’s health is being redefined to include the entire spectrum of women’s wellbeing with guest Shelly Lanning, Co-founder and President of Visana Health

Key Takeaways
  1. What are comprehensive employee benefits for women beyond reproductive health?
  2. Why are employers encouraged to support women's health comprehensively to attract talent, reduce costs, and improve well-being?
  3. A look to the future: a shift toward a female-centric medical model

Kevin Fyock:
Hello and welcome to “The Stretch” – a podcast brought to you by Aon that explores the latest breakthroughs and emerging ideas in workplace health and benefits. My name is Kevin Fyock, and I lead innovation for Aon within Health Solutions. In this cutting-edge podcast series, we'll discuss revolutionary approaches to employee wellbeing, interview thought leaders, and spotlight organizations that are setting new standards in employee benefits and health.

  • Read Transcript

    Kevin Fyock:

    We're kicking off this series with an episode called, “Beyond Reproductive Health: Employee Benefits for Women.” Now, as many of you know, May was Women's Health Month here in the United States. But, we think it's important to discuss this topic well beyond the confines of a single month. So you see, it's not an exaggeration to say within the United States, in many regards, we're failing women.

    So as employers, we do have a chance to be better. And today, we're going to ask the question, how do we do better? Many employers are rightly introducing benefits aimed at supporting working mothers, from fertility care to maternity leave. And while these benefits are hugely important. They serve women for only a small portion of their working lives.

    When we set out to support women in the long term, we need to start by redefining our definition of women's health. Joining us today is our guest, Shelley Lanning. Shelley is with Visana Healthcare. So first I want to welcome Shelly and give Shelly an opportunity to introduce herself. Shelly, again, welcome.

    So excited that you're on the podcast today.

    Shelly Lanning:
    Thank you, Kevin. It is a pleasure and an honor to be here.

    Kevin Fyock:
    Shelly, I think you and I had a chance to catch up before this podcast, and I think you and I have different passions, but similar passions around women's health, but again, from different angles. I think I'd love to spend the next 20 or so minutes really talking about the topic around how we redefine women's health.

    But I would love to first start about your background. So how did you get to Vasana? What is your background? And again, like me, where does your passion around women's health come from?

    Shelly Lanning:
    So Kevin, I've spent my entire career in healthcare with over 24 years now in healthcare venture capital, with several different opportunities to run and operate companies.

    Never during this time did we think about women's health as a category. We talked about seats at the table, glass ceilings, equitable pay, but we didn't think about it as an actual investable category. In 2018, the Mayo Clinic reached out and said, you're missing the boat on fetal and maternal medicine. This is a hot topic. And I made my first investment.

    I next went into fertility, then I looked at obesity management with a really strong focus on comorbid conditions for women. And the “Aha!” moment went to say, “There are so many conditions that fall outside a family building that were going completely ignored in the industry altogether.”

    Kevin Fyock:
    Wow, that's great. Well, I couldn't agree more. And I think the questions that I would love to run by you, I think, will speak to a lot of what you just mentioned before. And maybe without further ado, we could just jump right in Shelly. So, you know, I think I've been at Aon for a few years now and I've been in the industry for a while and I've had the great fortune of working with organizations throughout the country on women's health.

    But what's interesting is I feel like in the past dozen years or so, there has been this conflation – women's health with fertility care. And I think, and I'm sure you would agree, there's so much more to women's health than just fertility care. You know, for my own family, our fertility journey was one where, you know, we brought into the world two wonderful children. I have an eight year old and a five year old. But what's interesting is, you know, even as my wife and I talked about this, the fertility care represents a vast minority of, you know, the overall healthcare journey that women face. And I think it's something like less than 10%.

    So as we think about Women's Health, I would love your perspective as an expert in this field, you know, what do you think the right definition for women's health is? And then maybe a follow up to that is what do you think it lacks?

    Shelly Lanning:
    So one of the biggest myths in health care, I believe strongly in this, is that this concept that humanity is equal to male and for hundreds, thousands of years, we've always thought of women as being an offshoot of a male and therefore science, research, medical school curriculums, clinical trials, they all are designed and developed with the male and the male body in mind. And we now know that that's not true. Women's systems are, all the way down to our cells, respond differently, act differently, and a male-centric medical model is not appropriate in many conditions, and in fact is often harmful.

    So if you think about women's health as maternity and fertility, you lose all of the opportunities to treat the 90 percent of other conditions that fall outside of family building. Having a comprehensive model that can run from menstruation all the way through and past menopause, feels critically important, especially if one can layer on a female-centric medical model.

    Kevin Fyock:
    I'm so glad you brought up the point even on menopause. I think at Aon, we do a lot of surveying and one of the surveys we recently released was that about 70 percent of employers cover fertility benefits, but less than 10 percent of employers have specific benefits and provisions for perimenopause and for menopause.

    It seems like, in many ways, the bulk of women's health care happens on an employer's dime, whereas most of men's care is paid for by Medicare. So, from your perspective, I'd love to hear from you. Why should employers really care about the shifting paradigm of women's health?

    Shelly Lanning:
    Almost every major medical lifetime event for a female happens when you're, for the most part, when you're pregnant; it is in your 20s and 30s.

    Then when you end up having women's conditions that only impact women or people who are born with a uterus, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, chronic pelvic pain, heavy menstrual bleeding, menopause, it all impacts women before they're 50 years old. So the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s. are critical time periods where that's when women are dealing with these conditions that have historically fallen under the radar, gone untalked about or unresearched or very well understood.

    So this is really important as an employer to think about days off, how their health impacts their ability to work, to attract and retain talent. The whole gamut impacts an employer.

    Kevin Fyock:
    Yeah, I'm so glad you talked about sort of the human capital element of women's health. I think what we found at Aon is that when employers choose to ignore really the full spectrum of women's health, there is a cost of doing nothing, right?

    So it's going to manifest itself in a smaller potential talent pool, higher turnover, higher health care costs. So I'm so glad you mentioned that, right? Because it's not just always the healthcare side, it's, it's a human capital story and sort of the imperative employers to focus on women's health. It's probably more important now than it's ever been.

    Shelly Lanning:
    I would agree. And so often in our lifetimes, when people are expecting a baby, men, women, everyone talks about it! Talk about going to the appointment, talk about all of the gory details of the birth, everything. But every other condition is silent. And even as a female, you don't know what to expect. And especially with these conditions that have fallen or flown underneath what people are paying attention to. You don't know what to expect either. And if you're not talking about it, it just feels like it doesn't exist at all.

    Kevin Fyock:
    Well, and you're almost speaking to, Shelley, the stigma associated with so many elements of women's health. And I think as a society, we've come so far in the past 10 years of de-stigmatizing so many aspects of healthcare, including mental health, things like postpartum depression, focuses on, you know, other parts of, I would say, historically sensitive topics, but it almost feels like we still have more to do around women's health, right? So the battle of de-stigmatizing elements of women's health isn't probably where it needs to be.

    Shelly Lanning:
    Absolutely. But by encouraging people to be more aware, and to understand what are the different conditions, they can also help to impact outcomes for healthcare, improve greater access, reduce costs. What we found in our research is that women don't just come to us perimenopausal or menopausal, but they also have multiple comorbidities. It could be cardiometabolic, it could be thyroid.

    And being able to treat the whole person, all of the conditions, and incorporate aspects of whole-person care, diet, exercise, nutrition, mental health support, critically important to achieving great outcomes and a lower total cost of care.

    Kevin Fyock:
    Yeah, that's fantastic. Shelly, can you speak a little bit about, sort of, Visana's approach to women's health? You know, the elevator speech of, you know, what Visana's doing to further women's health.

    Shelly Lanning:
    So Visana's a value-based, virtual women's medical clinic, and we treat the widest range of conditions, from menstruation to menopause. We use an evidence-based unique care model that incorporates anything a medical doctor can do, right?

    So prescriptions, labs, diagnostics, but also whole-person care, diet, exercise, nutrition, mental health support, pelvic floor therapy.

    Kevin Fyock:
    That's wonderful. Yeah, I think I remember early conversations I had with Visana, just even sort of an initial intake that you would have with a patient is not a 5 to 10 minute meeting in an office, right?

    It can actually be quite longer than that to get the full breadth of an individual's, you know, broader women's health history so that YOU can pinpoint sort of what you need to really hone in on. Is that right?

    Shelly Lanning:
    That's right. So every woman gets access to a specially trained OBGYN or nurse practitioner.

    So we believe that every woman should have access to a specialist, a long appointment time and are encouraged to talk about all of the different conditions that concern them. And then our care plan is integrated to be able to address a lot of those concerns. From an employer perspective, what we pride ourselves on are providing excellent care, great outcomes with a lower total cost of care.

    It's very easy in contracting. We're a real medical clinic, so we bill through claims. We do not have PMPM, but instead, so we don't hit the medical budget, for example. And it's just a really easy streamlined process to provide whole person care with an evidence-based care model.

    Kevin Fyock:
    Shelley, as we think about how we as employers and organizations like Aon supporting so many organizations throughout the world, how do we start to shift that definition that you provided earlier in our podcast around women's health?

    So as we think about supporting women during their lives, not just the family-focus years, would love your perspective of as this paradigm is shifting, what is sort of the proof behind the pudding to say, how can we actually impact the industry?

    Shelly Lanning:
    Well, at Visana we believe that providing comprehensive care for an entire lifespan is really important to addressing all of the needs.

    The conditions that women have evolve over time. So endometriosis can start in your teens but become debilitating by the time you're in your late 20s or 30s. So having a care model and a plan that rolls through the entire lifespan of a female is, with best-in-class medical care, is really important.

    It's also makes it really easy for an employer to support a woman, all women, at all stages, no matter where they live. We're available in all 50 states. We are easily accessed with virtual care, so rural, harder to reach populations, it's very equitable.

    Kevin Fyock:
    Shelly, the entire health and benefits ecosystem is a bit crowded, right?

    I mean, there seems to be thousands of different point solutions. And we've heard from a lot of clients that there is this sort of point solution exhaustion or fatigue, right? So there's almost a solution for every body part, every organ, every ailment someone can have. And while that's amazing and I think the innovation behind so much technology in a different way to do things, sort of meeting people where they are, has been probably a really if not the most exciting part about my job.

    You know, because we're talking about women's health and Visana specifically, I would love to hear your perspective on how is it differentiated when you think about the large sea of solutions and opportunities to impact folks? Why is women's health the ability, in your opinion, to really differentiate for employer?

    Shelly Lanning:
    Kevin, we hear all the time from our self unemployer clients that point solution fatigue is very real. And therefore at Vistana, we are very motivated to offer a solution that covers an entire lifespan of a female from every stage. We also think it's very important to make it easy to light a customer, have easy contracting, be able to hit the medical budget so there's no administrative efforts whatsoever.

    And be able to provide validated and measured actuary outcomes that can demonstrate savings.

    Kevin Fyock:
    One final question for you, Shelly, because I think I could spend the rest of the day just peppering you with questions, because this is such a fascinating topic. So I'm going to ask you to look into your crystal ball a little bit. I think we all have our version of a crystal ball, but I'll put you on the spot, say from your perspective, what do you think the future of women's health looks like in the United States?

    Shelly Lanning:
    The future of women's health is critically focused on the care and care models that are actually impactful to women.

    Women have conditions that they're born with that involve the uterus or the ovary or the conditions of those organs. But so many of the conditions disproportionately impact women or impact women differently that we don't have enough data around, not enough science, not enough training in medical school, no awareness whatsoever, even with clinicians.

    So that paradigm is shifting as people start looking at how are women different, what are the studies, what are the impacts, and how do we then make sure that clinicians understand that impact so that then can trickle down and have relevance among all women everywhere.

    Kevin Fyock:
    Yeah, I think what really resonates with me, Shelly, is your comment around sort of the way our system is built is male centric, not necessarily female centric. So I think what I'm hearing from you is the future should, has to be, and we're hoping for truly a female-centric model and that's how we're gonna see the paradigm shift.

    Well Shelly, this was a ton of fun Thank you so much for coming to sort of the inaugural Stretch podcast here at Aon and lending your expertise.

    And to our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in.

    We hope that you enjoyed beyond reproductive health employee benefits for women and while this is the first episode of “The Stretch,” this is a podcast dedicated to the ideas that are revolutionizing the world of workplace health and benefits.

    If you enjoyed this episode, we encourage you to subscribe to the podcast and follow us throughout the season.

    We hope that you'll join us again soon, and have a wonderful day.

  • Podcast Transcript Placeholder

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