Christina Najjar Christina Najjar | August 20, 2019 | Lifestyle,
Carolyn Witte is a woman on a mission. The co-founder and CEO of Tia is on a quest to build a new distinctly female care model from the ground up, online and offline. Tia is a next-generation women’s healthcare platform bringing empathy and innovation together to help women approach their health holistically.
Tia recently launched a new campaign titled, “Women’s Health Is…” will bring awareness to the fact that there is so much more to women’s health. The campaign messaging will be reflected within the new site design and will live across social media via a series of unique videos featuring individual womens’ definitions of what women’s health is to them and fill-in-the-blank quizzes for consumer participation, that will be re-shared on Tia’s channels.
Since the conception of Tia, it's founding team has been relying on crowdsourcing to provide its members and app users with the most comprehensive care possible and uses this critical feedback to evolve the traditional healthcare model, ultimately providing better care. By hosting this campaign, Tia is not only able to receive additional feedback from current and potential members, but is also able to use its new site as a platform for visitors to crowdsource which city the next Tia clinic will launch in addition to expanding additional services for patient programming.
What kickstarted you to starting your own company focusing on women's health?
CAROLYN WITTE: The initial idea for Tia came from my own experience struggling to navigate the healthcare system while going through a three year long PCOS diagnosis process in my early 20s. When we launched our first product, the Tia women’s health advisor app, I quickly learned that my experience was not the exception, but the norm and that all-too-many women had a story (or stories!) struggling to get the care they need and deserve. This said to me, that to change women’s healthcare, we needed not only to give women better health information but deliver them better care. That was what pushed us to open our own real-worldia Clinic — a safe space designed to make women feel seen, heard and cared for in a transformative way; a space where you have an integrative care team that treats the whole of you and not a disparate set of body parts; and a community and technology that extends care beyond our exam room walls.
Why did you decide to open the first Tia clinic in Manhattan?
CW: That decision, along with many others, was directly in the hands of our app users. When we were thinking about locations for the first physical clinic, we let Tia app members vote on which city they’d like to see first. They overwhelmingly voted to see Tia come to NYC - so we obliged.
As we dug into why there was so much demand in NYC in particular, the need for more accessible, preventive women’s healthcare became strikingly clear: the average wait-time for a new patient “well-woman” exam in NYC is 26 days, though women report wait-times of up to 122 days. As a result, all too many women are forced to “choose” between the trifecta of care quality, convenience and cost.
Since opening the Tia Clinic in NYC, we, too, have been inundated with patient demand — further demonstration of the need here. Committed to convenience and accessibility without ever sacrificing quality, we are proud to now guarantee an appointment within 14 days of joining Tia.
Given that women's health is so broad, how do you help to create the most comprehensive care for them?
CW: The women’s healthcare industry is currently fragmented, highly transactional and over-indexed on treatment vs. prevention and education. Tia is about addressing both patient wants and provider needs and using tech and design to build a more personalized, soulful, relationship-driven care model that makes women healthier and providers happier within the confines of the pressures of the existing healthcare system.
You recently just launched a campaign called “Womens Health Is ___”, empowering women to speak up about their health. What do you want readers to learn about it and how can they get involved?
CW: From day one of starting Tia, we’ve been perplexed by the stark mismatch between how women define “women’s health” and how the conventional healthcare system defines it.
At Tia, we believe that this “mismatch” has existed in part because for far too long, women have been left out of the healthcare system — from the design of our institutions to insurance policies to clinical trials. It’s the reason that since Tia’s concept, we’ve been committed to co-creating or “crowd-souring” a new care model with real women, instead of redesigning women’s health in a vacuum. From the location of our clinics to the services we offer to the words we use on our health record, these inputs meaningfully shape the Tia offering.
Giving women a voice and a platform to share their wants and needs with respect to their health is essential to building a better care model that works for all of us.
By hosting this campaign, we are not only able to receive additional feedback from current and potential members, but also able to use our new site as a platform for visitors to crowdsource which city the next Tia clinic will launch in addition to expanding additional services for patient programming. Tia’s mission is to give women the ability to advocate for themselves in healthcare and this campaign is doing just that by giving all women a megaphone via social media.
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