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Welcome to the Bringing the human back to human Resources
podcast. I'm Tracy Chernoff, and I've
spent my entire professional career in HR Each week, we'll
explore the delicate balance between people and business with
the aim to reconnect the two and create meaningful outcomes.
Listen in as I share my own experiences, challenge the
status quo, and chat with guests from various industries about
our mission to bring the human back to human resources.
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Bringing the Human Back to human
Resources podcast. Thank you so much for being here
for another week. You know what to do If you
haven't yet, don't forget to rate, review and subscribe
wherever you're catching this episode, whether you're
watching, listening, running, teletoning, it doesn't matter
what you're doing. If you're sitting doing your
makeup, I don't know, just to make sure that you ensure that
you get these episodes every week.
This week I'm really excited. I have two guests who I actually
have had the pleasure of meeting in person because I was invited
to one of their events in the city, which was so much fun by
the way. But we're talking all about
their company, Flora. And it's, you know, we'll be
talking about really the the advent of Flora and how it has
completely transformed the fertility benefits that are
provided and afforded to people really around the world.
And Flora is doing something very unique.
So before we get into that, I'm going to introduce you to Doctor
Christie Lane and Laura McDonald.
So first, Doctor Christie Lane, I have your bio up here first.
So I'm going to have you sit through your bio and hear all of
the amazing things that you have done throughout your career.
Doctor Christy Lane is a global leader, leader of Insure tech
and investor, founder and award-winning health scientist
with expertise in AI, digital health and wearable devices.
Doctor Lane is the cofounder of Flora Fertility, the Stanford
Wearable health Lab, as well as founder and former CEO of Viva
Metrica. Doctor Lane is also a venture
partner with IA Capital and Insurtech fintech venture firm
in New York. She has built her career in
Women's Health research since the 90s and is blazing a new
path forward to combine critical components of wearable tech to
help inform insurance policies to make fertility treatments
more accessible. And who can't get behind that,
you know? As a mom of three, Doctor Lane
has gone through IVF herself and deeply understands the emotional
and financial challenges of treatment.
She's been recognized as Top 40 under 40 in Calgary, female
founders of Insurtech winner and top 20 women in tech.
So Doctor Lane, Congrats to you. Those are some amazing
achievements and accolades. And now Laura, I have the
pleasure of introducing you as well.
Laura McDonald is the Co founder of Flora Fertility and CEO of
Flora Fertility, the first individually owned insurance
solution for fertility and Women's Health.
She formerly founded, scaled and Sold Canada's largest financial
media company, Focus on Women and Wealth, and is passionate
about educating women about financial freedom and helping
them achieve those goals. Another thing I think we can all
get behind, frankly. She has guided product
wholesaling for a major insurance company and helped
scale a direct to consumer AI model in the e-commerce space to
have global market adoption across over 100 countries.
She's a mother of four and the author of two best selling
personal finance books and a former media personality in the
financial sector. So Doctor Lane, Laura, thank you
so much for being here, and I'm super excited for all the
listeners to better understand Flora Fertility.
Thanks very much, Tracy. And again, so nice to meet you
in person when you came to our events.
So we've been looking forward to this.
It was a fabulous event and I have to say, my friend and I who
I brought with me to the event, thank you for the plus one.
I don't, I didn't think that it was the right event for my
husband to join me at considering, you know, it was
one of those things where I was like, oh, I could see my friend
and I could bring my friend to this and this could be really
interesting for her. And it was.
And we loved the the lipstick readers that like the basically
colors are fortunes. Yeah.
And I to me, I was like, I don't care if there's science behind
this. It was fabulous.
I heard all of the wonderful things about myself.
I got to wear a lipstick. It was awesome.
It was a really wonderful event. So kudos.
Well, I I love that you experienced that.
I actually just side note, I didn't do the lipstick fortune
till it's like when you're at your own wedding and you don't
do it, you don't try a lot of the food.
You don't have a lot of people. So I'm so but it was a well
planned and I know a lot of people are excited about that.
So love that. Love that you enjoyed it.
Totally. No, it was it was fabulous and I
think it really helped me to better understand what you and
the Flora team are doing. And so maybe that's actually the
perfect place to start is helping the listeners to better
understand Flora and where the inspiration and motivation,
especially considering both of your backgrounds, where that
came from to say, hey, you know, there's there's a gap in this
world of, you know, benefits and perks and coverage for women.
I'd love to know more. So it was, it's, we always have
trouble remembering like how long ago this was, but now it's
going on over three years ago that we reached kind of thinking
about this on our own from a bit of a different angle.
My story was I, I do have 4 kids.
My kids are older, so they're, it's hard to remember like
2018173 daughters and then a son who's 12.
And so I had my kids kind of back-to-back in my 20s, my first
3, and and I didn't go through fertility challenges.
Actually in 20 years ago, you really weren't even aware,
honestly, if others might be going through it.
It was kind of kept a very quiet.
And so Fast forward to three years ago, I was seeing my
cousin, who's like a sister to me go through fertility
treatment and she was living in a major city where people had,
you know, pretty overall pretty high incomes, but they were
still struggling to afford treatment.
Even when there's some sort of grants, whether it's state grant
or provincial, the coverage is still very limited.
And so I was seeing that her support group became others
going through treatment. And while it's certainly a
medical crisis, it's equally a financial crisis.
And so I, my background's been in the world of finance and
bringing new products to market across insurance as well.
And I was kind of going to bed at night thinking there has to
be a better way to fund treatment.
And is there, can insurance play a role?
And so I was fortunate to get introduced to Christy through
Common connection. We had at a large reinsurer who
said that we should meet and I'll let her take it from here
telling her story. Great.
Thanks, Laura. Laura's absolutely right about
the fact that, you know, years ago people weren't talking about
infertility as you mentioned in my intro, Tracy, I did go
through it personally. So I, my, the fun fact between
Laura and I, we have 7 kids ranging from Laura's oldest is
20 to my youngest is 4 and we're the same age.
So it just tells you a little bit about the, you know, the
different paths women and families take.
But I did go through infertility.
And so my oldest is now almost 12.
And so this would have been like, you know, 2010 ish.
And nobody was talking about infertility.
And it was very isolating. There wasn't any community,
right? So I later found out that people
that I knew we're going through it as well, but nobody was
talking about it. And layer on the fact that even
living in Canada where we have socialized medicine, I was
paying out of pocket. And so at the time thinking,
yeah, it seems, it seems wild. I was shocked at the time.
And given my background in, you know, Medical Sciences, the fact
that I was surprised by it is telling.
It's just there was no education.
So, you know, that there was a while ago thinking about how we
could solve for the financial side, but also the community
side, right? Bringing women together, helping
them understand their bodies, their reproductive Physiology
and potentially putting them on a path to, you know,
successfully having a baby on their own terms.
And then, you know, Laura and I were injured at the time.
At that time I was building a different company.
But three years ago when Laura and I were introduced, you know,
it just made a lot of sense to build it.
We have very complimentary backgrounds.
I'm coming from the, you know, predictive modeling side of new
underwriting, that kind of thing, the scientific product
side of things. And Laura has experience in
bringing these types of products to market, so.
Right. It just makes sense in the time.
Totally symbiotic. Yeah.
Well, thank you both for sharing more about, you know, kind of
the inception of Flora when I and, and frankly, I think I've,
maybe I've even shared this with you.
Also, I have not struggled with infertility, which does feel
like a, a blessing in some ways, given some of the challenges
that women and families, let's say, experience when they are
experiencing infertility. And it's so interesting because
I'm, let me think, by the time this episode comes out, I think
I'll be 34, but I'm 33 right now as we're recording.
And as you know, I'm pregnant with my third.
So by the time this episode comes out, I will hopefully
welcome a healthy child into the world.
But it's so interesting because I have, of course, a lot of
friends that are similar ages to to me and they some have
struggled with fertility or they've struggled with having
some, you know, underlying health factors that maybe make
their fertility more of a challenge.
And I think about how when we were growing up and Chrissy, you
kind of were just talking about this too.
There wasn't a whole lot of conversation around that.
And now with the advent of social media, I think it's kind
of something that's almost unavoidable.
It's if I feel like I follow so many female content creators who
talk about their struggles with fertility.
And even though it's not necessarily something that I
have necessarily had to resonate with, I find it so interesting
because it makes me wonder how many women struggle with
fertility or have, you know, challenges with fertility
because maybe they they are not starting their family planning
until later in life. So I'm curious if you have some
statistics around how many women and families experience
infertility or maybe benefit from IVF and other types of
treatments? It's one in six and in some
cases in North America, one in five women.
People will need some kind of treatment for infertility.
The the interesting thing though is that there's a big focus on
IVF in social media. So you talk about people going
through fertility journeys. A lot of the time that's really
the focus of the conversation both from the media side but
also from the financial side in terms of what products are
available in the market. And it really is only about 10%
of those one in six that end up needing IVF.
So there's this whole spectrum. I know it's surprising to a lot
of people. There's this whole spectrum of
treatment, including just consultation, finding out what's
going on often is all that needs to happen.
Maybe you just have a regular cycles through diagnostics and
then medications and something called IUI.
And 90% of people are successful with those other treatments.
And so that's, that's an interesting piece of it, is that
there's a whole breadth of available pathways for women and
IVF really is just one of them. Just to add to that, I know we
talked kind of how many women needed and experience it, but
the awareness, you know, talking about that, the awareness from
social media made a really good point, Tracy, that we're
starting. The awareness is there because
we're all sharing our stories online, social media beyond
that. And I was just on an investor
call the other day and, and he as he got on the call, he said
I'm an IVF baby. It's how he introduced.
And I was like, that's exactly, that is why the awareness is so
real right now, because we're having this whole generation
that's coming into adulthood because they were born, because
their parents went through fertility treatment.
And if we think about it, the oldest IVF baby is in their late
40s, but it was still pretty rare back then.
So again, people in their 20s, thirties, there's lots of people
walking around now that were born because of their parents,
had fertility treatment. And so that awareness is very
real. And when we were building this
model, we really wanted to understand, would people be
interested in this? Would they buy it?
Would employer support it? And what we found was that over
50% of young women in particular are now concerned or aware about
their future fertility. And a new study showed even as
high as 72% by the age of 23 are thinking about it.
So we weren't thinking about it 40 years ago because it wasn't
even a possibility. But now this is this is
definitely not a niche topic. It's very real.
It's one of the hottest topics, if you will, among young women.
Wow, that is really, really interesting.
And I think that this is actually a really good
reflection point into why Flora is so different from actually
and really the first of its kind, but why it's so different
from what maybe others have seen where their employers, you know,
especially if they're larger employers with better group
insurance coverage that they have access to things, you know,
that others might not have access to.
And Flora specifically. My understanding, of course,
keep me honest here is that it's not a, it's not just group
insurance, it's a plan that people own and control
individually, which is really very unique probably in any
health based benefit that employees see or receive
anywhere. And so I'd love to dig in a
little bit deeper into understanding what does make
Flora different. Of course, that feels like it's
just a kind of the tip of the iceberg, and maybe even why
something like this hasn't existed before.
When we were developing Flora, we were looking at the existing
offerings and, and you're right, a lot of them were group
benefits plans typically available only through Fortune
500 companies because group benefit plans are typically
very, very expensive. So unless you're working for a
Google or a big bank, you simply didn't have access to those.
We really wanted to make it more affordable and more accessible.
Whether you work for a big company, whether you work for a
small, medium business, or even if you're going out on your own,
your contractor, your gig economy, the average person is
going to work 12 plus jobs in their lifetime.
So they need something that moves with them.
And so Flora is the first individually underwritten,
individually owned fertility insurance policies.
And I'll let Christy sort of explain what that means.
But in essence, what it means to the consumer is that it's in
your name. So think about life insurance
that's in your name and not just your employer's name.
Your employer can choose to support it and sponsor it, and
they can actually do it really affordably.
But if you decide to leave the company, you can take that
policy with you. You just start paying the
premiums. We've made it really affordable
anywhere from approximately 15 to $70.00 a month to have up to
the $50,000 of lifetime coverage available to you.
So that's actually double most group plans that are available.
And it really is the first one because of the depth of the
models that we built and because we have reinsurers backing this
product. So we're really looking at
future risk and offsetting that future risk.
And we can do that by having amazing global reinsurers
backing the product and then allows us to really give really
robust coverage for our policyholders.
And Christy, I don't know if you want to expand on the individual
right underwriting and how that's different from group?
Yeah, absolutely. So that the critical piece, if
you will, of our model is the fact that it's the first ever
individually underwritten meaning instead of risk pooling.
So say in Group insurance, for example, an employer will pay
for everybody in their group whether or not they're going to
use that product or not. And what happens in a group
model is you have something called anti selection meeting.
You don't know who's in that group.
You don't know what the you know, the magnitude of risk is.
And so often those policies end up being quite expensive because
you need to cover that risk. What we're doing is looking at
each woman to start and eventually men, but each a woman
to start, and saying what is your individual risk?
And how do we price that appropriately so that it can be
affordable, but so we can also cover the risk and pay for your
claims if and when you need them.
And so you asked Tracy, like, why hasn't this been done
before? You know, it might sound trite,
but because it's hard. It's a combination of, you know,
deep domain expertise in Women's Health and fertility, really
understanding what drives infertility, but also what
drives claims propensity, but also the ability to execute
through as Laura mentioned, getting capacity from
reinsurers. That's a big deal.
It's very hard to do. And also setting up the entire
regulatory structure of a brand new product, right?
This is, I was talking to someone else this morning who's
who are thinking about doing something in life insurance.
You know, there are thousands, 10s of thousands of life
insurance products on the market.
It's a known entity, whereas this had never been done.
So it's a lot around, you know, the background we have.
And frankly, the network, we have an insurance.
To be able to get fabulous, fabulous.
I mean, I think it's really unique and it makes a whole lot
of sense. Especially Laura, you, you
mentioned the statistic that most people will have around 12
jobs or experiences in their career.
I mean, that's kind of wild when you really think about it and,
and how imperative it is to have control over and access to
benefits such as this, you know, when it comes to fertility.
And Christy, you mentioned something about eventually men
as well. And of course, maybe maybe I
shouldn't say of course, but certainly some fertility
challenges are linked to men. And so I am curious then like,
is that kind of the next frontier for flora?
Because naturally, when I think about, I think most people,
frankly, not to generalize, but most people probably think about
fertility just from this women's kind of owned perspective.
That women are the ones that are fertile or infertile or have
comorbidities or underlying health conditions that make it
more difficult. And that men are not necessarily
in that same category or susceptible to some of the same
challenges. But it sounds like maybe there's
some thought around how it's, you know, how the framework goes
beyond just women. Is that fair?
It is about 50% of infertility challenges are on the male side.
But the interesting thing is there's not a lot that can be
done about it for men, right? So it's either usually it could
be lifestyle. So right, there are behaviors
that are known to impact, you know, sperm counts, sperm
quality, including, you know, smoking cannabis, other types of
drugs, lack of physical activity.
So those are things that are modifiable.
But you know, a lot of it is just potentially physical
blockage. And in that case that requires
surgery. But the vast majority of the
treatable parts of infertility are on the female side.
And so while we do understand and want to support the male
partner in this scenario, that is something that we would have
to build new models for. The good news though is, is that
most of the treatments for men, if you're going down the path of
say IUI or IVF are actually covered under the same treatment
codes as the women. So if you're as a couple going
through IVF, for example, the the payment for like the sperm
extraction and the spinning of it and all of that, that is
actually covered under a bundled ICD 10 code.
That's how we do a lot of, you know, a lot of it's actually
covered under the woman under a flora policy.
But maybe, Laura, if you want to talk about maybe men not buying.
Yeah, I when creating this product, we were looking at and
the way it's priced is similar to life insurance.
The, the earlier you buy the product, the cheaper it is.
Age is a big risk factor. You lock in that premium for the
life of the policy, so whether you're buying it on your own or
whether your employer is supporting it, that's all
factored in. And we really were built when
you're building it. We thought it was.
More likely that young woman and they can, you know, in their 20s
or 30s would buy it proactively more than maybe young men would.
Though we're hearing, we are hearing there is definitely a
shift in men thinking about their fertility at younger ages.
But as Christy reference, most of the treatments are borne by
the female partner and those are covered under a flora policy.
Now, one way we look at male infertility or risk is some of
our partners. We have partners in the space
related to your microbiome, your hormonal data, all these things
that can active fertility. And one of them as well looks at
sperm optimization. Men typically have 10 weeks
before conception where they can optimize their sperm through
lifestyle behaviors. So one of our partners helps
with that. But as Christy said, we're
focusing on on the female partner right now.
And when you create a net new insurance product, you cannot
just no way would you get reinsurance back if you said
we're going to cover every single person, every single
condition. We really have to narrow it
down. But it's still a very big market
for us. And we really think it's
important for women in particular to own their
reproductive health outcomes. Your job can be, you can be let
go from your job. You don't know what your your
health plan will or will not cover in the future.
If it's in your name, it is yours no matter what.
This is private insurance that you own and control, or that
your employer can also support. Absolutely.
I love that you've, you talked about the age factor as well.
I mean, certainly there are a number of people that I can
think about even in my own network who have opted in, in
essence, for, you know, talking about their fertility even
before they're, you know, in that stage where they're ready
to family plan in any, you know, event.
And I one of the things that generally comes up is egg
freezing, which I believe Flora does not necessarily cover
today. And so I'm curious if egg
freezing is something that is kind of like a totally different
ball game or if there's something, you know, maybe that
Flora is hoping to kind of bring into the fold down the line.
Especially understanding and appreciating how difficult it is
to enter into this market as the first of its kind and, and to
get things lifted off the ground.
I mean, certainly the $50,000, you know, lifetime coverage is
quite a, quite a number and hopefully, I would imagine
provides a significant amount of coverage for most people.
But egg freezing, of course, is one of those things that people
tend to talk about quite a bit, especially, you know,
considering it's recommended that you do any type of egg
freezing earlier on because the quality of a woman's eggs are
greater, I guess, when she's younger, the younger that she,
the younger she is, so to speak. I'm obviously not an expert on
this, but just out of curiosity, what are your thoughts there?
We so just to clarify, we do cover medically required egg
freezing or medically recommended egg freezing.
So you know, if for example, unfortunately you need to
undergo chemotherapy or some other kind of treatment for a
comorbid condition and your physician recommends that you
freeze your eggs, We do cover that.
The piece that we got it, it's the elective, it's the elective
egg freezing, it's the preventative.
And the reason, you know, the reason is you said
mathematically if we were to sell someone a policy that cost
$20.00 a month and everybody froze their eggs, then you know,
it's hard for the business. That being said, we are thinking
about and having some serious conversations about what a egg
freezing product could look like.
I would say we really look at it as a both an alternative and a
compliment to egg freezing. So if you're in your, let's say
early mid 20s, you may not need to look at egg freezing at that
point in time. It's very expensive, it's
invasive. When you actually look at the
numbers, only about 6 to 15% of people actually end up using
their frozen eggs. So you're putting out a lot of
dollars, you're putting your body through something and
there's a good chance you'll never use those eggs.
Also, if you egg freeze and you need to use those eggs, that's
IVF. That's 100% IVF down the road.
So that's another very invasive procedure.
So I would say if you're in your, you know, if you're in
your 20s, buy a flora policy. That's actually a young woman
said to me, I'm hearing that freezing my eggs is the only way
to insure my future fertility. And she said, you just made me
realize I actually just need an insurance policy.
So think of as an alternative in your 20s, if you're getting into
your late 20s, your 30s, and you opt to freeze your eggs,
absolutely go for it. But you should still have a
flora policy because depending on your risk profile, you've
already invested so heavily in freezing your eggs, Depending on
your risk profile, there's a good chance we can still offer
you a flora policy. And so for say, at around that
age, it might be $4050 a month. If you need to use those eggs in
the future, you will have the dollars to do that.
And so we really do try to align with egg freezing and in
different ways. And as Christy mentioned,
hopefully down the road that's something we can incorporate.
It's it's just a tricky one in terms of elective because as we
said, from a mathematical perspective, it just doesn't
work to pay $2030 a month and then be able to spend 15,001
year later on egg freezing. Of course, and it makes total
sense. And actually, I think that this
is helping to unveil a bit of a misconception actually around
what we, you know, normies might understand about fertility and
fertility treatments. And Laura, to your point and,
and really both of your points, when someone use, if they use
their eggs, if at all, then they're going through IVF and
that necessitates additional coverage anyway.
And and you know, coverage that otherwise they wouldn't have.
And you're talking to your point about 10s of thousands of
dollars if they're not, if they don't have coverage from Flora,
for example. And when I think about these
misconceptions, I certainly can relate this a little bit to
where, you know, people are kind of reliant on their either their
governments or their employers for coverage and understanding.
And I've had guests on in the past who have talked about, you
know, different types of benefits and perks, whether
health or financial and otherwise.
And a lot of what the conversation comes down to is
education for the benefactor, right?
So in this case, the employee. And naturally with Flora being
an individually owned policy with coverage, there's
inherently that built in education, understanding that,
you know, fertility coverage can look totally different for so
many people. And egg freezing is not the only
thing. And, and Laura, I really
appreciate that you shared that example from one woman who said
that they thought that that was their only option.
And so I'm curious if there are other misconceptions out there
or potentially even ways for people to further educate
themselves to kind of unveil those other misconceptions.
What I would say, which I'm kind of answering your question kind
of not, I think just on the whole there are there's just a
lack of education around infertility in general and what
that means, right? Because as I think I mentioned
earlier on, it could mean just that you have undiagnosed PCOS.
That was me, right? I ended up figuring out through,
I had no idea I had it. I frankly didn't even really
know what it was. And you know, or that you just
have a regular cycles through to you actually have severe
endometriosis and you require different kinds of treatments.
So one of the things that, you know, I think we're most excited
about is the ability to provide that education and starting from
the earliest day, right? So if you're someone in your 21
and you buy a policy, you're probably not going to have a lot
of medical education around what drives infertility, what are
your risks? What are the lifestyle factors
associated with infertility? You know, people ask, does
smoking impact infertility? Yes.
Does alcohol, yes. You know, things that and but
those are going to be very different questions than someone
who's, you know, 34 and trying to get pregnant.
That would be more around what are my options?
What are the potential, you know, medical barriers that I
might run into? And so for us, I think it's a
lot around really opening up the conversation, which is already
starting to happen, and helping women understand their
reproductive Physiology and the fact that challenges are
perfectly normal and that there are solutions for them.
And then the last thing I'll say is I do think the focus on IVF
is a misconception where people think if I'm going to need
fertility treatment, that's the only path.
And honestly, a lot of the times, 9 out of 10 times you
don't end up needing IVF. So that's a piece of the
education for us as well, both from the medical side but also
from the financial side. Of and on that IVF issue, so I
know when we look at how we established our lifetime amount
of coverage, which is 50,000 for some people, they'll go, well,
what about somebody who needs to go through 5 rounds of IVF where
there was an article I think in the Wall Street Journal this
past weekend, that one couple had gone through like 300,000 to
afford fertility treatment. Those, I mean, that's upsetting
across the board. It's incredibly expensive.
How can anybody afford that? There are certainly cases where
it is, you know we're getting into the 100 gram plus for
fertility treatment. But when we look at the average
it's around 50,000. And the reason that is, is
because again we focus on IVF and there's are those terrible
cases where they're going you're going through 34567 rounds at
1520 thousand around. But looking at that bigger
picture, when we look at that up to 90% of of cases are treated
in those earlier stages. People are still, it's still
costing them a fair amount. It might be 5010 thousand,
20,000 those diagnostics, the medications, the IUI, they all
cost, but it's not going to get up to that 100 grand.
So that's how our model takes into account an average of
50,000. But you also don't want to just
focus on IVF. There's some insurance plans out
there that that do because again people are still shelling out in
a clinical workflow often pre IVF five, ten, $20,000, thirty,
$12,000 that comes before that. And so just really
understanding, I think the two things we hear in the media are
egg freezing and IVF, they get a lot of attention, but fertility
and fertility, it's much broader than that.
And they actually, the really good news is there's so much
emerging data and science when we talked about vaginal
microbiome that's shown to be really interested if we're
looking at STD's that might prevent needing IVF down the
road. The hormonal data, I'm, it's,
there's so many interesting companies and people doing
really interesting things in this space.
So we're going to see a big evolution and how we're able to
detect and treat fertility going forward.
I do have to say real quick to that note because it, it made me
kind of, you know, reflect, I just met this awesome company
out of Stanford and they're building a non invasive hormone
tracking wearable device and, you know, that's able to track
all of the critical hormones. And it made me think back to
when I was trying to get pregnant and I, you know, I wish
I had it here. I literally had this little
machine, OK, and there were pee sticks.
So you had to pee on the stick and then you had to stick it
into this machine, and then all you got was a sad face, like
kind. Of like a.
Flat looking face or a happy face and that was it.
And but that was like revolutionary technology years
ago, right where you were like, OK, I know I have an irregular
cycle. This will help me.
So to Laura's point, I think, you know, it's both the emerging
predictive science around infertility, but also the
reproductive medicine science is just getting better and better.
The success rates are higher. The you know, personalized
medicine is getting better where it's like right treatment for
the right person at the right time.
Whereas back you know they will just die.
If you have babies 45 plus years ago it that wasn't around, we
didn't have AI. Now you have AI models running
on the sperm quality, running on the egg count, running on the
hormones to say this is what you should do and why.
And you know, that will give you your highest chance of success.
So we're in a really interesting era right now, I think for.
G. Is helping a lot.
Yeah, so interesting. And, and I do think that
people's just overall awareness will help in improving and
increasing all of that data because it's something that's so
important to people naturally. You know, some people go their
whole lives, you know, saying I don't want to get pregnant yet.
And then when they do want to get pregnant, they have right.
They have trouble sometimes. Like this is like a, you know,
it's like one of those sad jokes is that, you know, as a woman,
you're like, OK, I need to be on birth control.
I need to do this. I need to do whatever, whatever
I can do not to have a baby until I'm ready and then you're
ready. And sometimes it just doesn't
shake out the way that you talked.
Not like, what do you mean? I was like, yeah, I'm.
Very Type A, you know? OK, yeah, I'm gonna do this with
my life. I'm gonna do this and then I'm
gonna have a baby. In my head I was like, I wanna
have a baby at 31 and 33. Sounds like what you did, Tracy.
Pretty much, yeah. And, and it, it literally just
did not work out that way. And it was so frustrating.
But also what was frustrating too was that it was came as a
bit of a surprise to me, Like, how did I end up here?
And so I do think the exciting thing is that the conversation
is happening. More women are tracking their
cycles now. They're thinking about it.
They're doing things like egg freezing.
I know. Yeah, Christy said I, I think
you said once in another interview we did that you were
just so used to that. If you put in the hard work, as
I think a lot of women feel, if we put in the hard work, it's
going to happen, right, No matter what do we put our mind
to. And it just that doesn't
necessarily happen, right. When it comes to the totally
kids. I loved that it, it totally made
sense. That's our mindset and this.
Is yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
I've seen Yeah. Yeah, exactly, No, exactly.
And I there, there's some content creators who I follow
who have kind of vulnerably talked about how they feel like
their body fails them. And you know, they they spend
all this time working out and eating well and using, you know,
non-toxic ingredients and things.
And and then they're like, why is my body failing me?
And I think this is where, you know, when I think about Flora
and what it's what it's allowing women in particular and having
this individually owned coverage, it's giving them a
sense of control, which otherwise you don't necessarily
feel when you are, you know what I imagine struggling with trying
to start a family. And so that sense of control is
like, I don't know, as someone who is also very type A, that is
like one of the most peaceful things that I can think about is
like having control over something, you know, maybe to
my, my husband's dismay. But I love like no one loves
having control more than someone who is like, you know, maybe
like us and really planned. But really in general, like when
you feel in control of something like your body and your
fertility and your ability to get pregnant and whatever that
means to someone. Then there is this, you know,
you kind of have this whole world open up for you.
And so, you know, I realized we talked a lot about what Flora
does and how it's different and things like that.
But I'm also curious, especially since so many listeners are in
business and they're in HR, how they can.
Support individuals either themselves or at their their
companies to have access to flora.
Like are there employers who are, you know, reimbursing for,
for Flora's coverage, for example, or are there unique
ways that they can bring this back to their companies, you
know, for just more engagement of their population?
So fertility benefits are very much in demand.
As many as 88% of women are asking for these types of
benefits at work. And when we were building this,
again, the group models that are out there because they're
groups, they're very expensive. So they're typically only
available at companies with, you know, 5000 employees or more.
Smaller groups are typically excluded either because their
group is too small, the anti selection is too high, or the
coverage is just too expensive. And so for employers, it's very
simple with Flora, you decide, you know who you want to offer
it to at work. It could be all your, you know,
female employees that fit within our age range, spouses.
It could be adult children of of some of your employees and they
simply go through the underwriting process.
You decide how much of the premium you want to pay, whether
it's 100%, fifty percent, 25%, and then the policy is issued to
them and you're really there supporting it.
It doesn't need to be tied to open enrolment.
You know exactly what your costs are going to be as an employer,
so there's no risk of your utilization cost spiking out of
control. And that's what we're seeing a
lot with the existing group models.
So it's really meant to be affordable and accessible and
very beneficial for your employees.
And from a super practical standpoint, all we do is create
a Co branded landing page for you, for your company.
So you would send it out to those, as Laura said, those
eligible employees, they would just go through the regular
online underwriting process. And then we just bill the
employer directly. And the, the, the thing that I,
I gained a lot more understanding from, we actually
pitched on the employee benefits stage at HLTH this year last
month. Oh my goodness.
And you know, so many employers were struck by how easy it was,
right? The fact that, as Laura
mentioned, it doesn't have to be open enrollment.
You can offer this at any time of the year and then you're only
on the hook as an employer to pay for the premiums.
You're paying the premiums. The claims themselves are borne
by Flora because of our reinsurance backing.
Whereas some of these other group plans, you're actually
paying for the rounds of treatment themselves in addition
to PEPM fees, eligible employee fees.
So not only is it more affordable, but it's accessible
throughout the entire year and very straightforward to do so if
there are any listeners. And I do want to point out, so
as we're taping this, the Trump administration came up with some
and guidelines right around IVF accessibility.
One was on lowering drug costs, which is great whether you have
insurance or not, that makes your insurance go further.
The other one was around employers offering fertility
benefits because it has been out of reach for the vast majority
of employers, 60 to 80% of people still have no coverage
through work. And it's begin because those
group plans have been so expensive and those utilization
costs so high. And So what the Trump
administration was recommending that we offer fertility benefits
that's outside of traditional group or health plans.
And so that is exactly where Flora fits in.
Think of it more like a flex or voluntary supplemental benefit
that's highly affordable, easy for the employers to offer and
makes it very accessible for employees.
So we're really happy to see the administration come up with
those guidelines because it aligns very, very well with our
product. And to be honest, there's very
few, if any other providers out there who can match what we've
built here. And again, because of the years
of development and the reinsurers backing this product.
Amazing. Yeah, it's seldom we hear good
news sometimes. So it's really nice that
there's, you know, there are these opportunities for people.
And I do think this is where there's this fabulous
intersection for the employer and the employee.
Like the employee is like, this is important to me and I'm
paying it anyway. This would be an amazing thing
to get reimbursed for, you know, and especially considering what
the average cost of a plan is, you know, based on your website.
I mean, these are things that are ultimately pretty affordable
and go a long way from an engagement standpoint and how
employers show their employees how much they care about them
because fertility, you know, especially I just think about
the mindset of someone who's struggling with fertility or
thinking about this, that maybe they'll, they'll be that much
more engaged and productive in the work that they're doing if
they, this is 1 less worry that they have in their personal
lives. And again, one more thing that
they have control over. And so with that, I, I really
appreciate both of you joining the podcast and especially
considering its fertility awareness month by the time this
episode launches. And so I'd love to invite you to
share where the listeners can learn more about Flora, where
they could connect with you and hopefully, hopefully offer these
things to their employees or even just access this coverage
for themselves. Absolutely.
Well, happy to so happy to have this conversation today.
So thank you for having us. Feel free.
Anybody can go to our website, heyflora.com.
We are both pretty active on LinkedIn as well, so often
connect with professionals there.
That's probably the best way to reach out to us.
Amazing, Fabulous. Well, thank you both so much
again. And I think what you're doing is
amazing, and I'm really excited to watch Flora continue to grow
and offer so many wonderful options for people.
Thanks so much for having us. It's been a great.
Conversation. Thank you, Tracy.
Appreciate it. Hey, just before you go, don't
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