Theresa Neil (Founder, Femovate)

Can you explain your job to a five-year-old? 

I work with scientists to make sure that their inventions and their good ideas can be used by doctors and patients and caregivers to make people better. 

What excites you most about your job?

So, I've had Guidea, the design company, for almost 19 years, and we created Femovate almost two years ago. And I literally wake up every morning excited about what we're doing, which is amazing, because a lot of times when you're 18, 20, or more years into a career, you're doing it, you're an expert, but it's not really bringing you that real deep level of like satisfaction that you get early on in your career. And once you achieve mastery, then it starts to fall off. 

But in creating Femovate, I really tapped into an area where I have just infinite curiosity. And what's so fascinating about healthcare and the advent of AI and ML and all of the other inventions that are coming out is that you could never possibly learn it all. Every day, you learn a little more and you realize how much more you don't know. I think the parts that are driving me right now, which I find most fascinating, are meeting with all of these different innovators and founders and hearing about the inventions they're creating.

Through Femovate, we're working with 55 early-stage femtech startups, and they span all different product types. So it might be a consumer digital health product. It might be a medical device. It might be Software as a Service. We really run the gamut of teams that we're supporting with our sponsorship. But meeting the new applicants each week, people come in through my email and are like, ‘Oh, I heard you have a program. Is there any way that we can be part of your program?’ And so I get to meet all of these founders and the things that they're creating are mind-blowing. 

Which trend will change the future of medicine? 

We just did a report looking at the first 500 FDA-cleared software as a medical device solutions, and we put together some predictions for the next 500. We went in and looked at patents that have been filed, clinical trials that are underway, as well as what the government's investing in terms of innovation. I think it is a market transformation. 

So you have this massive underserved population, and there hasn't been innovation in the space in hundreds or thousands of years in some cases. And we're already seeing intense innovation in that space because women make up 50 percent of the population and we own 80 percent of healthcare spending, and the youngest generation of women right now are thinking about things from a different lens than my mom and grandmother thought about things.

So, instead of saying, ‘Can we make this speculum more comfortable?’ They're like, ‘What if we didn't have to go through this intrusive exam at all? What if we didn't have to go into the doctor?’ So I think there will be this absolute surge in femtech and women's health innovation, because there's just been so little. We're finally starting to conduct research to inform it.

And then, within that, I think there's going to be a real trend towards women gathering up information on options and having a better overall perspective of their health and kind of start self-diagnosing. The reason for that is the lack of innovation and research in this space means that, even when you go to a doctor who listens to you, they don't always provide a lot of options. So if you went in and you're like, ‘I feel like I'm going into menopause,’ even if they believe you and they're like, ‘Yeah, it looks like your symptoms and your hormone levels say that you are,’ they're like, ‘Yeah, we can give you some birth control,’ or, ‘Have you thought about wearing a tank top to sleep so that the hot flashes don't bother you?’ So a great set of solutions. 

But I think women are really taking matters into their own hands to try to figure out what works, because we've really been let down by the healthcare industry and the lack of innovation. And so I think as women start looking for more options and as more personalized information is coming online, I think women are going to feel really empowered to start controlling and managing their health as opposed to waiting for a physician or even entirely depending on a physician. 

Looking back, which trends have you missed or underestimated? 

I think probably one of the things that we overlooked 10–12 years ago with the advent of digital therapeutics is I think there's so much enthusiasm around the idea that a digital solution for patients could fill this healthcare gap that people have when managing a chronic disease. And there's so much enthusiasm about whether we could do it. What would it look like if we did it? Could we create designs that were sticky and kept people engaged over time? Because managing a chronic condition is a lifetime effort. 

I think we're really wrapped up in the, ‘Could we do it?’ The clinical trials showing yes, that it worked made us lose sight of the question of, ‘How would we get this into everybody's hands?’ ‘What would widespread adoption look like?’ and ‘How are we going to change the healthcare paradigm to adopt digital therapeutics?’

Which MedTech initiative or startup deserves more attention? 

I think the area of maternal health needs so much attention. The numbers prove that our mortality rate in the U.S. are too high. And our mortality rate for women of color and indigenous people is too high—appalling. And so we cannot talk about this enough. We cannot innovate enough right now to solve some of these really significant problems. And what I'm hoping to see is there's a way, with a bunch of inventors and entrepreneurs tackling individual pieces of maternal health right now. Like how do we screen for gestational diabetes? How do we help women, particularly women of color, understand their risk of hypertension during pregnancy? And how can we communicate that back to providers in a way that they're taken seriously so they get the best possible care? What about tracking health postpartum? What about helping women with nursing? 

And what we need are holistic platforms. Because one thing women don't need, especially when they're probably coming home from the hospital with a baby, is 28 apps on their phone, right? One for tracking postpartum hemorrhage risk, one for tracking how much milk you're producing, one for tracking baby's temperature, and one for tracking your temperature. And we can't be covered in 28 different devices. As we're trying to come home, we can't pop a new one on and we can't expect that women, as they're being discharged if they have a birth at the hospital, that we can hand them a bunch of tech and that they're just going to suddenly go home and adopt all of this tech and install all of these apps and put all of these devices on themselves and baby. So we need to start looking at a holistic maternal health platform—or set of platforms—that we can pull all of these individual technologies together and start seeing a real change in health outcomes for moms in the U.S. and around the globe. 

That said, I do want to do a shout-out to a specific team, even though their product is for a specific area of maternal health. I think what they're doing is absolutely game-changing. It's Armor Medical and the co-founder is Kelsey Mayo. They have created a wearable for expectant moms to proactively detect postpartum hemorrhage so it can be addressed immediately. There hasn't been any innovation in this space in quite a long time. And this wearable solution will really be a game changer. 

Where would you put a million dollars? 

We've now put in 1.5 million in pro bono services to 50 early-stage femtech companies. And we're actually looking for a million-dollar check because we'd like to continue to run this program pro bono for these underserved, underrepresented founders. So we would take the million dollars and we would continue to run the program.

So basically we do our call for applicants. We meet with all the founders, we assess where they are in their startup maturity. We identify if they have a need for UX research and design. We also sometimes support teams with go-to-market strategy if need be. And then we work with industrial engineering teams if they have physical devices. So I would take the money and I would run another year of this program and help another 30 teams.

What's the best advice you've ever received? 

Working in health innovation, but particularly in women's health innovation, where female founders have a very hard time getting investment for these brilliant, life-changing ideas, it can be a bit of a slog. There are many more no's than yeses and it can it can be a bit of a grind to keep going each day. 
And Pik from Design Angel shared an idea with her followers, and it was to create a jar of wins. Every time they have a win, she writes it down on a little sheet of paper and puts it in an actual mason jar. And when you're feeling low, you open up the jar and you pull it out and you read one of the wins. And it is incredibly helpful. Because you can't always call somebody and be like, ‘Tell me something good.Tell me what I'm doing is going to make a difference. Tell me, it's all going to turn out okay.’ But if you create your own win jar, then you can be your own your own biggest fan. And so you just have to remember to write down these wins, no matter how big or small they are. And you'll start to notice that even on those days that you feel low, you can look back and be like, ‘Wait a second, we've helped 50 companies. There's 28 more products in the market than there were, there's five FDA clearances.’ So whatever the wins are—sometimes it's just, ‘I worked with a team today and they were really grateful to have us look at a problem in a different way,’ but write it down.