Health-E Law Podcast Ep. 6
FemTech Meets DiagnosTech with Deirdre O’Neill of Hertility Health
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Listen to the podcast released March 7, 2024 here: https://www.sheppard.com/multimedia-551
Welcome to Health-e Law, Sheppard Mullin's podcast exploring the fascinating health-tech topics and trends of the day. Our digital health legal team, alongside brilliant experts and thought leaders, share how innovations can solve some of healthcare’s (and maybe the world’s) biggest problems if properly navigated. In this episode, Deirdre O’Neill of Hertility Health joins us to discuss the growing role of Diagnostic in fertility and reproductive health.
About Deirdre O’Neill
Deirdre O’Neill is the Chief Commercial & Legal Officer at Hertility Health, a women’s healthcare startup offering unique diagnostic testing that provides advanced, data-driven insights into reproductive health, fertility decline and the onset of menopause. A dual-qualified lawyer in England and Ireland, Deirdre holds a Master's Degree in Medical Law from King’s College London. After working in Venture Capital Law, she decided to enter the world of startups full-time and subsequently co-founded Hertility, where she currently oversees corporate strategy and deals with legal, scaling, and business operations.
About Sara Shanti
A partner in the Corporate Practice Group in the Sheppard Mullin's Chicago office and co-lead of its Digital Health Team, Sara Shanti’s practice sits at the forefront of healthcare technology by providing practical counsel on novel innovation and complex data privacy matters. Using her medical research background and HHS experience, Sara advises providers, payors, start-ups, technology companies, and their investors and stakeholders on digital healthcare and regulatory compliance matters, including artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), gamification, implantable and wearable devices, and telehealth.
At the cutting edge of advising on "data as an asset" programming, Sara's practice supports investment in innovation and access to care initiatives, including mergers and acquisitions involving crucial, high-stakes and sensitive data, medical and wellness devices, and web-based applications and care.
About Phil Kim
A partner in the Corporate and Securities Practice Group in Sheppard Mullin's Dallas office and co-lead of its Digital Health Team, Phil Kim has a number of clients in digital health. He has assisted multinational technology companies entering the digital health space with various service and collaboration agreements for their wearable technology, along with global digital health companies bolstering their platform in the behavioral health space. He also assists public medical device, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical companies, as well as the investment banks that serve as underwriters in public securities offerings for those companies.
Phil also assists various healthcare companies on transactional and regulatory matters. He counsels healthcare systems, hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, physician groups, home health providers, and other healthcare companies on the buy- and sell-side of mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, and operational matters, which include regulatory, licensure, contractual, and administrative issues. Phil regularly advises clients on matters related to healthcare compliance, including liability exposure, the Stark law, anti-kickback statutes, and HIPAA/HITECH privacy issues. He also provides counsel on state and federal laws, business structuring formation, employment issues, and involving government agencies, including state and federal agencies.
Transcript:
Sara Shanti:
Welcome to Health-e Law.
Phil Kim:
In today's episode, we're discussing opportunities and challenges in the reproductive and fertility health space.
Sara Shanti:
I'm Sara.
Phil Kim:
And I'm Phil.
Sara Shanti:
We're your hosts today. I want to thank you all for listening.
Phil Kim:
We're very pleased to have Deirdre O'Neill with us today. Deirdre is a Co-Founder and the Chief Commercial and Legal Officer for Hertility Health, which is shaping the future of reproductive healthcare by pioneering unique diagnostic testing that provides data-driven and advanced insights into reproductive health, fertility decline, and the onset of menopause. Deirdre is dual-qualified as an attorney in England and Ireland with a masters in medical law. So her experience in venture capital law, coupled with everything else that we mentioned, allows her to provide unique insight into this space. At Hertility Health, Deirdre and her incredible team are also active in conducting research trials to promote innovation in these critical spaces. Thank you so much for joining us today, Deirdre.
Deirdre O'Neill:
Pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Phil Kim:
Great. Well, just to dive right into it then. Our first question to you would be, now that we're in 2024 and we'd like to look into what your crystal ball looks like for the future of reproductive health and fertility, what challenges and opportunities are you seeing on the horizon?
Deirdre O'Neill:
Starting with the challenges, I think definitely some of the challenges we saw when we incorporated five years ago have vanished, though the biggest challenge was why do women care? Why does this matter? And that was something that we faced so frequently with investor meetings, with conversations that we had with people. And it's funny that the change in that narrative has progressed so profoundly over the last few years because now it has dominated conversations and it has become something that people are so focused on removing. But when we started, it was taboo. And so if you can see the change from five years ago to today, we've already advanced a huge amount. Now it's actually shameful that we are in 2024, and yet we're only just really starting to get people to wake up to the importance of 52% of the planet.
And I think that that's the critical thing that we need to recognize is that yes, there may be some progression, but the reality is it should never have been taboo. Women's health should not be taboo. Reproductive health should not be talked about in whispers. And the fact that we have very little, on close to zero data on women's reproductive healthcare it actually just goes to show how far we need to come in a shorter time. And that's one of the things that at Hertility, we've really prided ourselves on beginning from a patient first perspective.
So it starts with the user, everything to do with the individual person, their biometrics, their blood, their lifestyle factors, their history, their menstrual patterns, everything to do with that individual is important. And that's where we're starting to see that the future will hold. My hope is that we are building the world's largest dataset of female gynecological pathologies in order that we can diagnose conditions sooner, in order that we can hear women, diagnose them quicker, get them answers much sooner. And we're already starting to see that, but that's where I'm hoping that the future advances very quickly and it will advance hopefully with the solution that we are bringing to the table.
Sara Shanti:
And in doing that, not only breaking some of these centuries-old taboos and making it a little bit more accessible and understanding what the hurdles are, Deirdre. What are you seeing as some of those trends, some of the positive trends that are coming out of these explosive changes that, to your point, are just happening in this millennia?
Deirdre O'Neill:
People talking about it. I suppose one of the great entry points becomes the social narrative. So people talking about things online, people expressing how they feel, people expressing things about their bodies, how they work. And I think that that's the real wave that we're seeing is it's not just about education, it's about a broader conversation point. So people talking about, "Hey, is this normal? Is that normal?" Rather than normalizing pain, which the system has brought women up to. "Hey, pain is normal, periods are meant to be painful." Things are normalized in a way for our mothers and even for some of us that I think younger generations to come, they won't be. And I think that that's where the social media conversational point really sort of propels people and propels sort of a movement into people speaking about the things that shouldn't happen. I think that the trends will be that people talk about it more, but that they will track it.
And that's honestly the trend that we are trying to pioneer is that we create a movement of women that are empowered by backing their own bodies, they back their own life decisions, where they have choices, where women go and they get what they want, they get what they deserve, that they are powered by science, that they're strengthened by knowledge. And that they are part of this reproductive revolution because they know about what their life choices are because they've researched it, because they're innately in tune with their own reproductive biology.
We are trying to pioneer a world where people track their rate of ovarian reserve decline, that people will never just guess. People won't just say, "God, maybe I can have children, maybe I can't." But that they will innately be tracking for a very long time throughout their life so that they fundamentally know their rate of fertility decline as well as their onset of perimenopause and menopause. This is crazy, but I met a 51-year-old woman whose period stopped and she thought she was pregnant. It says a huge amount about the fact that we have access in our hands to any bit of information we want, and yet there are educated women who reach 51 years in their life and they don't understand the basic fundamentals of their biology. That's where I think things will change radically over the next few years.
Sara Shanti:
Yeah, and I know that Hertility has been on the cutting edge of that kind of changing the outlook and the discussion. You've also had some really exciting, and I encourage all our listeners to go to your website because I think the media on your website even is a game changer of how you talk about this area of healthcare and wellness, but you're also collaborating with some really exciting third parties and industry players to support the payment and the financial strain that some of this healthcare would bring about to employees and how employers are buying in. Can you talk at all about that today on some of the really kind of cool collaborations that are happening out there with Hertility?
Deirdre O'Neill:
Yeah, we've got some amazing partnerships. There's two sides of partnerships. One of the angles of the business is that we are direct to consumer so that anyone can buy this. We really wanted this to be accessible for every woman. But we also are a workplace benefit. So I do refer to it as an employee benefit or a workplace benefit, in the States employee benefit. So we go into organizations and they seek to obtain an accreditation called Being Reproductively Responsible. The reason I started that was because I worked in international US law firm in fact, and I could always see that there was, you're served with useless platitudes, you're served with meaningless things.
Like don't get me wrong, I loved the cupcake trolley or the cake trolley. That was the thing I didn't need but thrived on. But it is even the thing that stops your eye twitching if you've done an 18-hour day. It isn't the thing that really kind of says, "Okay, I love my job." And I think that organizations are seeking to try and retain employees, especially because you sacrifice so much of your own personal life to get your hours up or whatever it is that you're doing. And I think that reproductive healthcare is one of the biggest things because the thing that what people are missing is that they'll refer to fertility benefits or menopause benefits or a single life event that they're trying to cater for. And primarily the narrative is, "Hey, you know what? We'll pay for egg freezing. We'll pay for you to freeze your eggs. We'll pay for you to put off having a family so that you work through your fertile years and then we'll deal with the problem when it's a problem." And fundamentally, I think that that's incredibly corrupt, and I think that it's really misleading.
It's like giving a gift, but taking everything away. And I think that that's one of the things I feel most passionately about is changing the narrative in the workplace to stop selling this myth about, "Hey, we've got all these amazing benefits," but actually let people know that it's okay to have family when you're ready to have family. But it's also more important to check in to see, maybe you want to go for partnership and you say, "Now isn't the right time to have family. But I want to be able to check in to see how many years I've got on average." Just estimating to say, "Actually, maybe I want to go for partnership or I want to go for this promotion, or I want to see how long I've got." And I think that that's one of the things that we're robbing women of is vital information to make key life decisions.
And so what we do is we provide reproductive health screening. So testing for employees. Education is so key because it's not just women who need to understand this, it's men as well. Men need to understand how either reproductive conditions or fertility or someone who's struggling to conceive or going through some process or perimenopause or menopause, men also need to understand how this impacts their co-workers, their wives, their daughters, their partners. Men and women are truly equally impacted by this in the workplace.
We've partnered with a number of organizations. The most recent last week was LVMH, which is Louis Vuitton Moët & Hennessy. And we went in and did a large partnership launch starting with education, and then testing obviously comes afterwards and then policy is brought into that sort of package. And for me, it was really important to do that because I could just see how many companies were saying, "We're doing something amazing." We're either doing, like they say, we're going to provide you with false benefits in terms of fertility benefits. I think that was the sort of wraparound benefit approach that we wanted to take. We've also partnered with Nobu Hotel Group, Channel 4, The Telegraph, our more UK and Ireland orientated businesses. But yeah, I think that there's big things to come in that space for us.
Phil Kim:
That's great. And whether it's education or coming up with solutions for folks, how do you see technology and other industry players moving to the space affecting what you all do? How do you see digital health making an impact in reproductive health in general and fertility?
Deirdre O'Neill:
The reason why I think having a digital interface is vital is because most of the diagnostic parameters rely on someone telling the truth, rely on a piece of information about them. That means that they have to be truthful in that delivery. And when you go to a primary care provider, even if it was a gynecologist or in here, it's your general practitioner or your local doctor, they have to ask a series of questions. And on average, a doctor has nine minutes per appointment with a patient. But this extensive nature of the questions that need to be asked, plus the person telling the right answer, means that a lot of the time there's a vital piece of information that's missing that means that they can't quite get why someone might be struggling to conceive or someone might have symptoms.
Not every woman is going to be truly candid when they're asked about how much they bleed, if they bleed, is it painful, is intercourse painful? Any of these really intimate things that you are expected to disclose, which may be a key factor in providing a diagnosis. And that's where I think having a digital interface means you can ask a certain number of questions. Our journey begins with a health assessment. The health assessment asks a number of questions, and they're related to someone's lifestyle and all of these different things. That's the only true measure of how you can get an accurate diagnosis from someone.
I think that there's a huge space for digitalizing that level of healthcare, but we've also encoded over a hundred years of expert clinical practitioner knowledge into our online health assessment. It takes five or ten minutes to complete. But when you combine that with the blood test, which measures up to 26 specific hormones, then it's customized for the individual patient using the data captured in the online health assessment, we have an algorithm that combines both the online health assessment and the hormone data with AI-powered quality control. And that process helps us to diagnose patients in days, not in months or in years. And I think that that's the key, is being able to create the combination of that human-generated clinical report combined with an AI element. That's what's going to underpin the quality of future healthcare from a digital perspective.
Sara Shanti:
And you have previously used a really cool term called DiagnosTech, of diagnosing but through technology or through some really innovative and inventive ways to get some of that diagnosis to those who potentially need it earlier at the right time. Can you talk a little bit about that DiagnosTech?
Deirdre O'Neill:
It sounds better when I say it actually.
Sara Shanti:
Okay. Do it.
Deirdre O'Neill:
DiagnosTech, it's a play on words but it's kind of ruined when you break it up.
Sara Shanti:
Much better.
Deirdre O'Neill:
Where that started was that we get branched into FemTech. Everyone uses this cute term FemTech, and honestly, that annoys me. The founder of the word FemTech is an amazing entrepreneur. But in reality, what I resent is the fact that women's health, again, gets swept into this kind of cutesy bracket. And FemTech is now encapsulating everything from tampons and mooncups to fertility. And honestly, Hertility is biotech, it's medtech, it's healthtech, but actually because we are in a diagnostic space, I think the fact that we can diagnose over 18 conditions, I would prefer the term DiagnosTech as a company umbrella. Now, obviously people look to have branded terms in terms of what the company does to, I suppose, stratify what they do, but that's where it originally, that kind of cutesy term FemTech is designed to cover what we do, and it's actually a lot broader than that.
Phil Kim:
We appreciate all that you do in this industry and appreciate your time here today. Thanks so much for joining us.
Deirdre O'Neill:
Thanks so much for having me.
Phil Kim:
That is it for us here today. We will see you next time unless you need us in the meantime.
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