What Market Trends In Women’s Health Do You Need To Know? with Rachel Braun Scherl

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:00:03 Hi and welcome to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, and I am so thrilled to have you here as we dive into today’s episode. As always, innovating and integrating in the world of women’s health. And just as a reminder, the content in this podcast episode is no substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your medical or licensed health care team. While myself and many of my guests are licensed healthcare professionals, we are not your licensed healthcare professionals, so you want to get advice on your unique circumstances. Diagnostic recommendations treatment recommendations from your home medical team. Enjoy the episode. Let’s innovate and integrate together. Welcome back to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond. And today I have a special guest for you. We’re going to talk about the Women’s Health MBA, if you will. So if you are a women’s health or wellness professional or a woman looking for better access to health care yourself or better health care, you’re in the right place when it comes to integrating a business mindset.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:01:26 I want to introduce you to Rachel Braun Sheryl. She has over 30 years of experience working as a business builder and marketing strategist, managing partner and co-founder of Spark Solutions for growth. What’s so important about her to our audience is that she comes to this with a truly MBA mindset. She’s coming at this looking at the business case for building women’s health businesses, whether their primary solo practices, one on one health coaching practices, integrative health practices, or people looking for a larger growth through apps, educational companies, women’s health products. Thinking about the marketplace, how to assess who your ideal client is, how to determine which products are going to be most profitable, how to see what your profitability is of your current client base, what it looks like, what numbers you should be tracking. This is the episode for you. So tune in and we’ll chat on the other side about what you can start doing in your practice today to drive more growth and serve more underserved women. See you then. Welcome. I’m so excited to introduce you today to Rachel Braun, Cheryl.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:02:53 And for our listeners who are women’s health and wellness professionals, this is one you definitely want to tune into. To learn more about growth, branding, marketing ideas, strategy, whether it’s a solo practice or a digital practice. Rachel has so much experience in the world of women’s health care from a business perspective. So hi there Rachel.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:03:19 Hi Jessica, thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:03:23 Thanks so much for giving us your time. So before we dive in, tell me a little bit why. You know, from a business perspective, you decided to focus your practice on women’s and sexual health.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:03:37 So for me, which is a bit unusual in this space, so many people who go into business in this space, it’s often in response to an experience with a health challenge. They looked around, didn’t see good solutions. They said, I have to find one as they look for one. They said, it’s not just me. This could be bigger. I’m going to create a business.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:03:56 Mine at the time was purely for capitalistic purposes, so someone had to me a business plan years ago for a product that improved arousal, desire and satisfaction for women at all ages and life stages. And I looked at the marketplace and I said, there were 35 active clinical programs. Now there are two. We don’t have a language around this. We don’t have options. Only 3 to 5% of obstetricians and gynecologists at that point were even having these conversations. So it just seemed like the perfect storm of opportunity. And then once you put your toe in, you’re hooked.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:04:32 Yes, absolutely. So as I mentioned, our community is primarily women’s health and wellness professionals who either are working in small solo practices or digital practices, educational practices. Where do you begin to Think about how to structure your branding and then to start layering in growth strategy. You know, you said you kind of started with the business plan. Most of our practitioners are starting with a clinical or coaching mindset or personal experience. So they have to work backwards.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:05:11 Yeah. So the first thing that I would say, if you’re an existing business is listen to your current buyers, patients, clients, customers, whatever you call them. Assuming that you’re an ongoing business, you really want to understand at a deep level who are you appealing to? And by that I mean who is coming in or logging in and paying for your services. Is there a target profile you can build of what that 1 or 2 typical profiles looks like? And where can you find more of those people? So that’s the first place that I would start, because when you’re a solo practitioner, it’s so much about the personal relationship and that does involve things like doing patient interviews. What drew you? What kind of problem? What message motivated you? Was it all word of mouth? If it was word of mouth, what was the word of mouth that got you here? You know, this doctor helped me with menopause. This doctor looked at me as a whole person for the first time. They thought about my psychological well-being.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:06:14 So start with what already exists and figure out if there are enough people who look like that. And my hypothesis is that in most of these marketplaces, especially if you’re also offering telehealth, there are lots of people who are looking for this. The second piece is, you know, you have it in the title of your podcast, integrative. Women have historically been treated as body parts, and I don’t mean that in a sexualized way, although that’s also true. What I mean is you’re a woman trying to get pregnant. So we’re going to focus on your ovaries and your uterus. You’re menstruating. We’re going to focus on the things related to that. What the business of women’s health is reflects really much the treatment of women’s health, which is that it’s a multi-system view of a person. So just to take an example, if you’re looking at the model for female sexual response, it’s not a circle. It’s not go from A to B to C the way we used to think it was. It’s a combination of physiological realities, psychological realities, social behavior, contextual, emotional.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:07:25 So the idea that your practitioners can help someone make sense of the complexity that is them is important. And I think a lot of people want to know that the practitioner has an understanding of how these things might connect. We’ve been educated enough, certainly over the past two years, when I like to joke, the New York Times discovered menopause. We’re seeing so many more articles about the brain body connection, the gut brain connection, the vaginal biome, overall health connection. And I think that’s a really compelling message for people who want to feel better. And they don’t exactly know how.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:08:06 Yeah. And so I think what you’re saying, and the reason why we educate in this way, is that the practitioners need to be forward with the fact that they have integrative training, that they’re not thinking about women just in a silo of how’s your depression? They understand that their depression is related to their hormonal shifts, to their gut microbiome shifts, and to their day to day life, their financial pressures, their relationship pressures.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:08:36 So that integrative approach, and I think it’s really interesting when you were talking about potentially interviewing your current and past patients and clients. What exactly are people saying and those words around? This is a practitioner who took a moment to listen to me. This is a practitioner who didn’t just dismiss me as needing to go see a psychologist. That I think is really the meat of what a lot of people are looking for right now.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:09:05 And I think they’re easy, efficient ways to do it. So, for instance, you can decide you’re going to put together a ten question questionnaire and ask people to fill it out while they’re waiting or you send them the link online. It’s amazing to me what people will do with a relatively small Amazon gift card or Starbucks card. So you want to make it easy, and you also want to make it efficient and inexpensive because you don’t have a huge marketing budget, most likely. And you want to do this as quickly and efficiently as possible. And you made another point, which is so important in any kind of customer interviews, the act of doing it itself creates a connection with the customer.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:09:48 The other piece is in terms of what’s going on now. You know, you don’t have to be the most famous TikTok doctor, but people want to know that you’re putting out content that can help them. The amount of content is so overwhelming. Some sources are good, some are bad. Some people call the same sources good and bad, depending on what your perspective is. There’s this confusion about what’s true and what’s not. So building a relationship by providing answers to the things you’re hearing in your practice is a very easy way to communicate. You know, whether it’s a once a week newsletter that you can hire an intern to do. They might not be able to write the content, but I’m very aware that in any business, especially if you’re a solo practitioner, you’re doing everything, you’re ahead of supplies, you’re ahead of accounting, you’re ahead of treatment. You’re ahead of billing. So all of these solutions need to be logical in the context of that. So none of my suggestions for solo practitioners are due a request for proposal.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:10:52 And hire a marketing firm to spend six months redoing your website for sure.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:10:58 Now, one of the things that my students ask me all the time, and my answer to this tends to depend on them and their business goals. But are there some insights you can give us from your decades of experience in this marketplace? They have the opportunity to send email marketing. They have the opportunity to build a social media platform. They have the opportunity to do live speaking like what do they pick? Because often they’re trying to just see patients too. So.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:11:30 So again, I would start out with what’s happening with their current patients. And I would look at metrics. And I think that’s something that you often don’t think about. So, for instance, when I’m looking at a business or working with a business, I’m looking at things like lifetime value, which is very roughly how much revenue did I achieve from this particular relationship? When you’re looking at a practice, I would look at my existing data and you have to.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:11:56 That means you have to be capturing it. How many people are word of mouth? How often does the average patient come in over a year? How much am I making from any additional products that I’m selling? Really understanding. And I’m making these numbers up. But let’s say you need to cover $100,000 a year, and your average patient is paying you 1000. That’s pretty clear how many patients you need to have in a year. Is that reasonable? Are you open enough hours to make that happen? How many people would you have to see a day? What would you need to charge? All those things should not be just I’m going to do a gut feel, but start with is there a revenue? People go from bottom up or top down, but is there a revenue number you want to make, or is there a cost that you need to cover to keep your lights on, whether that’s in your physical office or whatever the system is through which you’re working with patients, what does that cost? How many patients do you need to see in order to make that happen? With the overage, which hopefully there is, there isn’t always.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:13:03 What will you do with it? Do you want to spend $1,000 doing a study? Do you want to spend $500 having patients come in and having appetizers and discussion? You have to figure out what are you trying to accomplish of the objective is you need to double or triple the number of patients. How do you do that? Well, if your practice is built on word of mouth, how can you motivate existing customers to come back? Can you offer them a 20 minute coaching session? Can you offer them access to some materials that you only get as a practitioner? How do you motivate people to be your ambassador and bring in other people? There’s a measure that is used often in business called Net Promoter Score, which very roughly translates into how likely is someone likely to recommend you? And it’s varies dramatically by category. And women’s health tends to be at the lower end. But you’re looking for a Net Promoter score that’s certainly above 50, if not above 70, which means 70% of people are likely to recommend you or to give you a positive recommendation.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:14:15 So I think oftentimes what happens when you embark on a growth strategy is exactly what you said. Jessica, how do I do this? I’m just trying to see patients. We’ll start with is a model where you’re just seeing patients going to work financially, you know, things like that lots of people don’t collect. How often are they coming back? What is the average cost? Are there any other ancillary products? How long does it take from the time someone first reaches out until they make an appointment? How do you shorten that time period? Ultimately, it’s about customer acquisition. What does it cost you to get paying customers in the door? And I know lots of your practitioners are not necessarily looking for venture capital, but one of the metrics that we look at all the time is customer acquisition cost over lifetime value, which means does it cost me more to acquire this patient than it does in terms of the revenue they generate? So again, using fictitious numbers, if I make $500 a patient and that includes everything that includes my staff, that includes a percentage of the utilities, that includes all my overhead and all my marketing.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:15:26 And I have $500. What am I willing to spend to get that new patient in the door? And that’s when you understand how much financially that you have to work with.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:15:36 Yeah. And I think one of the big challenges for people who go into women’s health care is they don’t think about from the beginning, just capturing those metrics.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:15:48 You can’t measure what you don’t ask and what you don’t keep.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:15:51 Yeah. And one way that I start recommending this is like start tracking the data at the level at which you can. I think sometimes people get a little paralyzed by I don’t have all the right accounting systems, or I’m not collecting these numbers to the third decimal point. Like, sometimes you just have to start collecting the data at some level.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:16:14 Like how many patients am I seeing in June? What’s my average patient load on a Monday? There are very, very basic things and I totally agree with you. It’s overwhelming. This is not an area that people who are treating patients are trained to feel comfortable with.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:16:29 There are lots of low hanging fruit resources available, whether it’s accounting, social media. There are lots of things you can outsource. And the other piece is who’s in your community? How can you put together very easily? A group of ten practitioners. And maybe you’re not directly competitive because you’re not in the exact same geographic area. Or your offerings are a little different. Gather learnings. Get best practices. I’m a big believer in don’t reinvent the wheel. Lots of the questions you have someone else has asked, and maybe someone has made more progress answering them. So can you meet through zoom once a month with five practitioners who you respect, who have characteristics in their practice that you might aspire to or they might aspire to you? They might say, well, what Doctor Drummond does that’s so great is I see her doing LinkedIn all the time. How do you fit that in? Who creates the content? Who’s posting it? What has been the return? Is that something that I can try?

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:17:34 Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:17:34 Yeah. I do think that networking is so, so valuable. So to take a wider view of this, your work now is in venture capitalism in this space, correct?

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:17:46 Yes. I mean, I help companies raise money, but I’m really focused on how do you drive growth in any business that deals with women’s health. And as I’m sure you know, the definition that we’re using now is things that affect women only. Meaning you have to have biologically female organs to have concerns with them. The second is things that affect women primarily, which is anything autoimmune, Alzheimer’s, dementia, lupus, migraines. There’s nothing particularly female about those conditions, but women suffer from them in much greater numbers, sometimes as high as 80% of the sufferers. And the last is things that affect women differently. The largest example of which is heart disease. And we also saw that in Covid in terms of symptoms and long Covid and all those other things. So I work with any company in that space helping them figure out how to grow, which is many of the same questions you asked me.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:18:40 Where’s my revenue coming from? Is that working? How long are people staying? You know, in business, when you’re looking at a spreadsheet, you look at something called churn. So if I have 100 new patients in and the average patient, I would like them to come in or the program I set up is they come in three times a year. Of the 100 patients that come in on the first day of the year. How many of them are still with me? Am I getting people in the top? And I have a leaky bucket because it’s way easier historically to generate more revenue from an existing customer than it is to find a new customer. So going back to your question, funding is one of the vehicles for growth. Partnerships is another vehicle for growth. Understanding your consumer better than anybody else is another vehicle for growth. So it’s all about how do you get people who you want to buy your product or service to buy it? I call it very pragmatic strategy because otherwise it’s an incredibly expensive hobby.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:19:37 You know, I’m sure all the practitioners who are doing this are doing great work with their patients. They might have to work too hard to make a basic living. You know, we certainly know in the reimbursement insurance fields that women’s health is historically reimbursed at a lower rate. You know, a lot of the services that your practitioners, I believe are offering are not necessarily covered by insurance. And so you have this whole issue around cash pay. These are really complicated issues.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:20:11 Absolutely. Each practice is so unique because some take insurance, some are cash pay, some are more digital coaching programs. You know, they’re all very unique kinds of businesses, and they all have their own challenges because of course, with insurance reimbursement, it’s a little bit easier to access patients who want to be able to use their insurance. But as you said, often the reimbursement rates for things like pelvic physical therapy or women’s health dietetics, women’s health dietitians, I think they’re only reimbursed, like maybe $35 an hour, you know, and it’s just unsustainable.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:20:49 And then others have no codes at all. Health coaching has some codes, but they have not been accepted by Medicare or the insurance companies yet on a consistent basis. So I do think the payment issues are big challenges. And then for the direct to consumer cash pay, you have a limited number of consumers who can afford this kind of direct consumer care, and they’re more discerning because they’re paying out of pocket.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:21:17 And just to give an example. So obviously in the coast and the south and in major cities in the middle of the country, we think there are people with a lot more free cash flow. It is very clear that people make choices and they pay for what they value. So one of the things you can ask in your survey or in your individual patient conversations is not help me price this. Maybe you just talk to your friends about this. What are the things that you’re willing to pay for? So certainly you look at the growth of Botox. There are lots of people who can’t afford $800 an injection, or they shouldn’t be doing that relative to the cash that’s coming in.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:21:58 But they find a way because it’s important enough. I want to circle back Jessica for a minute in terms of what you’re tracking. You also want to track health outcomes. What are you hearing from your patients? And maybe that’s also a survey. I have more energy. I got a promotion. I sleep better. I’m up one time during the night. As opposed to six. I don’t have the same number of symptoms of urinary incontinence. You have to be measuring the outcomes, and some of them are soft, and they don’t always come through a blood pressure cuff or getting on a scale. So they’re much more qualitative and lifestyle related. The other challenge in general, I think, with an integrative view of health is that’s not how most physicians are trained, and it’s also not the experience most patients have had. You go to the doctor to treat a disease or you have a concern, you go to the doctor. We have not figured out in our health care system how to create and elongate wellness.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:23:05 You know, we’re now getting there a little bit with longevity. I just came this morning from an opening at NYU Langone of the Women’s Collaborative Health Center, which is exactly what it says. It’s integration of every kind of specialty you can think of. But there’s also a piece on wellness and longevity, because we know we know logically. We know empirically that it is way less expensive to be well than to treat disease. And one of the things that’s happened in women’s health in the last couple of years is we’re now seeing the economic models that say that.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:23:42 Yeah. Well, and for us, you know, in our data, that’s one of the reasons why we launched our longevity certificate program for women’s health. Because exactly. We were saying longevity, you know, prevention of dementia, of long term nursing home requirements of hip fracture, spine fracture of cardiovascular disease in women really starts in the late 30s to early 40s. That’s when the implementation of longevity has to happen. now. It’s never too late.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:24:12 Certainly we can start with women in their 70s, but that economic benefit really expands out.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:24:20 And the lifestyle benefit. Yeah. And the health benefit and the quality of life benefit.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:24:26 Absolutely. And so that message is starting to get out there. What are some of the other big trends in our organization? Absolutely. The longevity conversation. We’ve been talking about endometriosis for 25 years and chronic pain and perimenopause and menopause. Are there any other trends in women’s health that you see as being more in the public awareness?

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:24:50 Well, there are a few. Obviously, you can’t turn left or right without reading about menopause or seeing a new menopause company, which is terrific that the conversation is much more active. And what I said early on, when I got into the space where I saw the biggest opportunity, was there was no conversation. You know, we’re in decade three of a world with Viagra. We talk about bigger, longer, stronger. When I first got into women’s satisfaction. Women traditionally don’t think of sexual activity as a performance sport.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:25:22 You need to have the vocabulary to be able to have a conversation. So we’re making progress in menopause. We’re making progress with the new definition that I laid out. There are more people talking about it. There are more sources of capital. There are more women’s health funds. There are more women who have had an exit, are at a stage in their life where they have money to invest. All those things help. Those are really important in terms of what I see from sort of the diagnostic or what diseases are we talking about are conditions. I see a lot around how do we teach hormonal health? Hormonal health isn’t just when you menstruate. It’s not just when you’re pregnant. It’s not just when you’re estrogen drops during menopause. But can we be taking a longer term view and think about a life cycle of hormonal health? The other place where I see prevention so desperately needed, and what a lot of people are talking about is, you know, you mentioned pelvic pain and PCOS and endometriosis. You know, we’ve all heard the sobering statistics that it takes 7 to 10 years on average to diagnose PCOS or endometriosis.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:26:34 That’s unacceptable because it often coincides with your prime years of fertility. So there’s a lot of effort on diagnosing conditions earlier because, again, early diagnosis leads to earlier intervention, leads to early treatment and results in better outcomes. And I see that across the board. So there’s a lot of work around better diagnostics. You know right now to diagnose endometriosis very very clearly without any doubt require surgery. Now there are endometriosis companies focused on diagnosis because sometimes the treatment might be worse in terms of the outcomes. And we’re really talking about options. And that’s not just reproductive health. You know whenever we talk about choice people immediately go to abortion and termination. And that’s critically important. But one of the things that’s happening in women’s health is you have choices. There is not only one solution for menopause, because there are potentially three dozen to 100 symptoms of menopause. It’s not like you can just find one vitamin or talk to one physician. So there’s a whole push around giving her optionality and educating her. I got on a soapbox about how poor the state of sex education is in the country, and I share this statistic because nobody really ever believes it.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:28:06 30 plus states in the country require mandated sex education, and a subset of those don’t require it to be scientifically or medically accurate.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:28:15 Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me at all. Working in this field for this amount of time, the other thing that’s very important, I think in women’s health that we’ve really missed the mark on. Is that okay? I guess in about half the states we have okay. Sex education, but we don’t really have general health education. So this idea that you were talking about around what is a normal hormonal menstrual cycle, what symptoms are normal. And I do highlight the work of Shannon Cohn around her organization. And we’ve been supporting this program called the Nurse’s Training Initiative, something like that where they educate school nurses. But pediatricians you know, women’s health starts in puberty. I mean, obviously it could start before then, but roughly in puberty. So we’re talking about girls who are between 8 and 12, 15 and all through middle school, high school, college. These are important years for optimizing health in general bone health.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:29:21 I have a 21 year old and a 14 year old, so I’m knee deep in it. But mental health, bone health, hormonal health, risk of endometriosis or PCOS like this is when these early warning signs are presented. And school nurses know very little about this. Pediatricians know very little about.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:29:42 This, and it’s not their fault. I mean, it’s not that these are practitioners who aren’t trying to do the best that they can, but you also bring up another important point. If you’re looking at someone from an integrative health or wellness perspective, you can be the source of education. She or he coming into the office doesn’t often have the basic information. And so the other this isn’t new, but what we’re seeing is we’re seeing companies and practitioners fill the gap with information. So I was just interviewing an MD who focuses on integrative health and was really talking about the mind body connection and so much of the work she did, she had to educate herself beyond what she learned in medical school or, you know, in her residency.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:30:32 Yeah, absolutely. I think people who are pulling together those pieces and providing education, whether it’s through public forums like YouTube or social media, but also directly to their population of clients, to their local communities, speaking and educating people directly. Because if you’re not really getting standard good health or sexual education, they don’t have this information. And there’s a lot of misinformation on social media or, you know, misinformation, I think is such a crazy word because the reality is it’s just they’re teaching people things that are wrong.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:31:08 It’s just noise. You shouldn’t even call it information. Misinformation is noise in the background.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:31:14 Yeah. And a lot of times it’s incorrect to the point of being dangerously wrong. So I think people that have this training across systems, really it can be so valuable not only to their practice, but their community in general to start giving this education in different ways.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:31:34 And if you go back to the beginning, how do you get people in your office if people don’t even know what integrative health is? How do they know they want to buy it? So part of it is helping them understand what it is and what it does.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:31:50 And sometimes it’s difficult to pinpoint. You know, I reduced your blood pressure or you lost 6% body fat. But there are metrics. There are actual physical metrics of wellness. Going back to the peace with menstruation, there are lots of physicians who are talking about the menstrual cycle as a new vital sign. We hear over and over again, it is not normal to be in excruciating pain when you menstruate. It is often an indicator of a concern that you need to do some more digging on. So I look at the people who are practicing, you know, in your network, a huge opportunity to help people look at their health in a bigger, broader way and in a way that they can connect their choices to how they feel living their life.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:32:40 Yeah. So it’s really about that data collection and then education to fill the gaps. We talk a lot about being focused. You know, women’s health isn’t really a niche because it’s so many people. So because so many things are algorithmically driven at this point.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:33:00 What are your thoughts on sub knitting in women’s health, if you will? The smaller the better.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:33:07 So it’s interesting. My sort of life pledge is before I die, no one will ever use the phrase women’s health and niche in the same sentence. Yeah. So women’s health is huge. Women’s health is bigger than anybody else’s health. It has a bigger impact on the family structure. We saw during Covid how big an impact her health makes on the whole family, and also has implications for the family’s financial health. So the first place I would say it is not true. Just take menopause and do the math. One out of two people on the planet will go through menopause, whether it’s surgically, chemically or over. The life cycle. Process induced 50%. One out of every two people there are from 1 to 100 symptoms. Women on average experience symptoms in Perry and menopause and post menopause 7 to 10 years. I sort of challenge people with that equation to say everything else is a niche. The numbers don’t support the language, which is why the conversation is so important.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:34:14 You know, even when you look at sexual arousal. So 30% of men have Ed, they’re multibillion dollar businesses. And certainly they were before they were off patent. 43% of women have sexual concerns and difficulties. So the target population at some point in their life is 30% larger. So it’s just not true. So I think you just have to say to people, that’s not true. Those aren’t the numbers. 80% of expensive diseases, women suffer in greater numbers. It’s not just about fertility. You know, and we think of the number of live births in the US, and it’s a finite number and apparently it’s going down. But it is not a niche if you start talking about it really in the numbers and in the context of what a woman’s poor health impacts.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:35:07 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a women’s poor health actually impacts men’s health very directly because women are the ones who make men go to the doctor. You know.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:35:21 In many cases, and as I mentioned, there are a lot of large consulting companies who have come out with studies.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:35:26 You know, the Mayo Clinic says we lost $1.8 billion in productivity in a year for women dealing with menopause symptoms, 20% of the workforce are women in menopause, and a large percentage of them think about leaving the workforce for sure. McKinsey said there’s $1 trillion in missed economic opportunity in dealing with women’s health in a different way. Women’s health is sort of everybody’s health, and there have been a lot of discussions in the space. Should we just get rid of the women’s? Is that holding us back? And the answer is yes. And it might be, but it is not the same as men’s health.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:36:04 Sure. Like, do we stop saying women’s health? Right. And I think the challenge is right now you have to speak directly to the consumer in a way that they can understand you. And that circles back to what you were talking about in the beginning. What is the word of mouth that inspires people to actually take action? What are the words? What are they hearing? What are they looking for?

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:36:29 What is the color?

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:36:30 Yeah.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:36:31 And people might not be able to tell you what it is, but you certainly know when an influencer isn’t talking to you. When I look at Gen Z influencers, you know they’re selling $80 million worth of mascara. I’m listening to them saying, of course I knew they weren’t for me, and I don’t spend that much time getting beauty tips on TikTok, to be perfectly honest. But they are speaking to different audiences, right?

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:36:57 Right. And so how you speak to your audience really does make a difference. I mean, women in their 50s just inherently know that the information they’re getting from a 25 year old fitness trainer just is not applicable to them at this point. And the reality is, I think it’s highly, essentially underserved. To be a woman yourself, I was just interviewing for a different episode. A colleague of mine who’s in her late 70s who does heavy strength training. She works full time. You know, she’s a real inspiration. And this is so possible for people and to have models of that and to have experience and education from people who are actually doing this and living this and have a depth of experience is an advantage, not a disadvantage.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:37:49 Even though people feel much less comfortable, let’s say being on camera or kind of being out in the world in that way.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:37:56 One of the ways to figure out what’s resonating with your audience is you put out a lot of content. I mean, you see that influencers and physicians who are talking online, there’s a lot of content. It won’t all resonate with you. One of the things that you mentioned also about what’s working for you. As much as I hate to say this because women have everything on their list already, you have to be your own health advocate. You can find an integrative physician who could help you. You could find a general practitioner, or you can find someone in a specialty who can help you. But there is no better person. And never has it been easier to get information about your own health and understand what it is. There’s no doctor or magician who can track your symptoms. There’s no doctor or device that can understand really what you eat every day. Unless you’re doing some of the work providing some of the information and tracking for me, that doesn’t mean tracking every heartbeat.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:38:56 Sure, for some people it does well.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:38:58 And that really is the key role of health coaches, right. Because health coaches, that is the role is to keep women empowered and centered as essentially the CEOs of their health team, but also understanding how each treatment is integrating within their life within, you know, are they having any side effects, you know, is eating too much or too little protein changing how they feel? That’s really the magic of health coaches. They have the communication skill set to help people understand exactly how to do that, even if they’re tracking even.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:39:31 What to look for. Yeah, maybe I never considered that my protein intake is having an impact on my energy.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:39:37 Yeah. And you know, how do you do it if you’re traveling full time for work, or if you’re going to your mother in law’s house for a holiday, or if you just had a new baby. Like, how do you keep up with all of it? And that’s really where health coaching, I think fits in so seamlessly.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:39:53 So I think to finalize this, I would love to just hear your opinion on what are we looking at in the next decade in women’s and sexual health. Like where should women be thinking as they’re building their practice, as they’re looking to serve more, to reach more women without burning themselves out?

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:40:14 Yeah, that last phrase makes it a little bit difficult, but it will be an understanding of hormones, not necessarily because you want to prescribe them, but because now everybody is talking about hormones. After 20 years of women suffering and not being considered candidates, certainly for HRT. We’re now having conversations around hormones. You have to understand hormones. Biome is starting to filter into the common language. What is that? And I think one of the challenges is getting to some real metrics of health. Yeah, BMI isn’t good enough. Blood pressure isn’t good enough. How do you make it easy for someone to understand what their health state is? I think integrative coaching is a great option because people are desperate for connection and information.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:41:04 And the relationship that you’re practitioners. And this this is my perspective. So correct me if I’m wrong is in a certain way more intimate. It is more personal, it is more detailed, it is more comprehensive. So we’re also seeing this unbelievable need to for connection, which you don’t usually think of going to a health care practitioner for. But going back to your original question, I think we’ll have many more options. I think we will hopefully start to see better and earlier diagnosis of diseases. I think we’ll start to see earlier intervention. I think we’ll start to see easier solutions. That’s a whole nother area. You know, GLP ones are doing a lot of amazing things. And, you know, doctors are saying what happens when you go off? What happens if you don’t change anything else? You know, the same conversation that we’ve been we’ve been having for years. I think people will have even more ways to get their health care. So telehealth really changed the game for patients. I think we’re going to see most people have a combination.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:42:11 I think we’re going to see a big burden or a big responsibility on patients to be tracking information, because if you see a physician once a year, a lot has happened in those intervening 365 days that he or she might not know about. And I would say we’re going to see much clearer definition and activities related to wellness. How do you create wellness? Now we know any doctor I speak to on any therapeutic area, whether it’s professional, you know, for doing work in this space or personal, you need to eat better. You need to hydrate, you need to sleep more and you need to exercise. Okay. Got it. In what amounts? In what numbers? We really are going to be getting to personalized solutions for people. And with the amount of data that we have we’re able to do that. At least we have the potential to be able to do that in a way we never have before.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:43:07 Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, Rachel, for your time, for your insights, for your wisdom to help people really connect the dots around how to communicate better with their potential clients, how to better retain and better serve the clients they’re already working with.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:43:24 I think, like you said, that’s a huge area of growth is probably right under people’s noses. And some of the ideas and thoughts and insights from your experience about what’s coming. So I think it’s a challenging and exciting time in women’s health, and we have a lot of opportunity here.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:43:43 Absolutely. I think for the first time in a long time, we have at least some wins at our back.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:43:49 Yes.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:43:50 Even if you look in the news and you see what’s happening with funding, which is scary and real, the army of people caring about this and having money to invest in this continues to get bigger and the interest continues to grow.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:44:04 That’s encouraging. Do you think it’s hugely concerning that we’re damaging our scientific infrastructure?

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:44:10 But it’s hugely concerning. And I’m having a positive women’s health day. There are days where I, you know, only think of gloom and doom and I have to. One of the things I do is I go back to the customer or the patient for the businesses that I’m working in and saying, how did this product or service change someone’s life? Because it can get very overwhelming.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:44:29 You know, for a minute We cut the $10 million for the Women’s Health Initiative. Doesn’t make any sense. It’s a drop in the bucket. And this isn’t political. We very clearly know that. We don’t know enough about the biology and the foundational understanding of women’s health. Even as we cut it, we’re going to be at an even greater deficit.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:44:49 Absolutely. I mean, obviously, all of the cuts to research. And like you said, often, even if it’s not direct cuts to women’s health, is politically a direct cut to women’s health because so many chronic illnesses are experienced in larger numbers or in different ways by women. What I’m encouraged by is exactly what you said, that there are more women business owners in this space and more women with the funding. You know, even ten years ago, there was almost zero capital directed by women. So that has changed significantly in the last decade or so.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:45:32 And I would also add there are allies. They don’t all have to be women. They tend to be.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:45:36 But you have to have allies. And I don’t love that. The reason a man gets motivated to invest or get involved is because he has a wife or a daughter. I think that’s great. I cannot tell you how many meetings I’m in where someone says I care about this. I have two daughters. I agree we should care about this not just because it’s the right thing to do, and that’s not a business argument. Doing it because it’s the right thing to do is not a business argument. Doing the research coming up with the solutions is an enormous business opportunity.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:46:09 Yeah, yeah. And I think leading with that just gets more people on board, which I am 100% for. So thank you so much for your time, Rachel. And where can people find you if they want to learn more about your work and working with you?

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:46:23 So Rachel Braun, Sheryl, my company a spark. Look up any combination of that. My social handles are be Cheryl or Rachel Braun. Cheryl. You can find me.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:46:34 I write a lot. I speak a lot. Whether anyone’s listening or not. But I’ve been very vocal in this space for a long time. So. And anyone who wants to reach out to me, I love hearing from people and ideas and suggestions and concerns. I always say, you know, I am not giving you medical advice. I don’t even play a physician on TV, but because of the work that I do. Oh, by the way, I did think I was a neurosurgeon because of watching Grey’s Anatomy, but I never went in and tried that on a patient.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:47:01 Okay, good, good.

Rachel Braun Scherl 00:47:03 But, you know, educate yourself. It’s on you. That’s the first, most important thing. Your coaches and the people in your community are educating themselves. And you’ll get better results if you come in with more information and have better understanding of your own experience.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:47:19 Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the empowerment piece is not to be understated, because women have access to information and they need to take advantage of that so they can ask better questions and build better teams for themselves.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:47:33 So thanks again for your time. Thanks, everyone for being here and I’ll see you next week. I hope you enjoyed getting to meet Rachel. I love her perspective. It’s very different from most of the people and practitioners I’m talking to in the women’s health space, day in and day out, because she comes to it with that MBA mindset. Now, there are some challenges with looking at the business case for women’s health. But at the end of the day, if we want funding that is similar to Men’s Health. And what’s so interesting is what we talked about in this conversation is that women’s health really relates to everyone’s health, and healthcare of most conditions is directly applicable to women, and often more so or slightly differently. So while the business case shouldn’t be the only driving force for building a certain kind of women’s health practice or women’s health business, it is important to be really financially savvy so you don’t burn out so that you create something that is needed and will be utilized by the marketplace so that you can learn where your clients are coming from.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:48:52 So if you have not really deep dived into this already, this is your homework for this week. Interview your current clients. Interview your friends who are like your clients. What is the gap that they’re really struggling for in their own healthcare journey? Why did they come see you? What is the word of mouth as we talked about? And I want you to start tracking at least one metric. Where is your revenue coming from? How much is it per client? How many clients are you working with per week? How tired are you? Is that enough? Is it too much? What is the effectiveness of your energy being spent inside of your business? So pick 1 or 2 metrics. Start tracking those this week. The more you measure, the more you’ll grow. See you next week. Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. Please share this episode with a colleague and if you loved it, hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast streaming service so that we can do even more to make this podcast better for you and your clients.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:50:11 Let’s innovate and integrate in the world of women’s health.