Why I Started Pangea Health

Healthcare has always been a major part of my life. Most, if not all can say the same. But for me, spending time in doctor’s offices was commonplace and frequent.

When I was thirteen years old, my mom picked me up from wrestling practice (yes, believe it or not I wrestled … no, I was not very good). She had a cold and mentioned her glands were swollen and I noted that mine were too. Except it wasn’t really a swollen gland. Rather, it was a nodule in my parotid gland.

We went to the pediatrician the next day and I was prescribed antibiotics. The stubborn nodule didn’t relent. After visiting numerous specialists, we finally visited a head and neck surgeon. They performed a fine needle aspiration and shortly thereafter shared with my mom that it was cancer.

So it began… long days and evenings in waiting rooms. A parotidectomy. Thankfully no chemo. Follow up visits. CT scans. PET scans. The works. To this day I still visit my oncologist to ensure I’m in good health.

Fast forward eight years and graduating from UConn I was unsure of what I wanted to do professionally, but I knew that I wanted to work in healthcare. I landed a job with Eli Lilly. I was 21 years old with a trunk full of drug samples and brochures in my sangria red Ford Taurus selling a portfolio of pharmaceuticals to physicians in the Bronx. I still found myself in the provider office waiting room, but now it was my office.

I spent four years in pharmaceutical and medical device sales. I went back to school to get an MBA from NYU and started working in healthtech as a marketer. It afforded me the opportunity to build sales forces instead of being a sales rep. Rather than viewing sales as an independent arm of an organization, I focused on building sales as a marketing channel. It was remarkable to track the success of efforts taking place at the point of care by independent representatives promoting a product that was something other than a pharmaceutical.

After meeting with numerous entrepreneurs, founders and operators in digital health, it became clear to me that sales was top of mind but not a function that they had built out. This was for a variety of reasons: cost, operational experience, attribution, time constraints, resource constraints and much more. But there was consistent agreement that this was something that they wished was part of their org or their marketing strategy.

As a patient, I am totally floored by the businesses that have proliferated in digital health. They are wide ranging. Innovative. Necessary. But in order for these tools to be widely adopted, physicians need to know they exist and patients need to learn about them at the point of care. This is not to say patient adoption will only take place in provider offices. Rather, we need to start thinking about how physicians integrate digital tools into their workflow and treatment regimens instead of solely focusing on these products as direct-to-patient. While some patients respond well to direct response marketing, others consult with their doctor before starting a new product or program.

I remain remarkably impressed with the abundance of talent in medical sales as well. This, too, is a space that can be reshaped. As a rep, I recall how incentives were misaligned. Simply put, sales representatives should be paid for how hard and how smart they work. They should be paid quickly and they should have flexibility and discretion with regards to when they work. They know best the dynamics of the provider office they are visiting. It’s incumbent upon them to discern the best way to make a sales visit. Empower representatives with technology and watch them flourish.

Enter Pangea Health. I started the company at the end of 2021 and had the fortune of meeting Taylor Greene at Twelve Below who believed in the vision. At Pangea, we’re working to bridge the divide between digital health and physical doctor’s offices by pairing sales representatives with our partner companies. Using our software, sales reps are able to find partner companies and complete training to ensure they are delivering a powerful, on-brand message. Upon completing a partner assessment, representatives have access to our data to sell our partners at the point of care. The data that we provide guides our reps to make an efficient sales visit to a relevant physician.

We’ve got some of the best digital health companies already on our platform and a waitlist of many more. These partners instantly have access to a nationwide medical sales force, all managed by our proprietary software. Our model is pay-per-performance, so partners can scale their sales efforts to appropriately match their business needs. We already have thousands of incredibly talented representatives in our network that are making more and more sales visits everyday. The timing for what we’re building feels right as countless remarkable healthtech startups advance their product while growth marketing, particularly in healthcare, continues to see headwinds.

Thank you to Brian and Cate for joining Pangea when it was merely an idea and turning it into the amazing early stage company that it is today. Thank you to Taylor Greene for believing in the vision and helping us create an enduring, impactful business. Thank you to Ben, Eric, Graham, Meagan and the team at Lerer Hippeau for betting on us and supporting us through our next chapter. Thank you to mom for getting to the bottom of that stubborn nodule and showing me the power of perseverance.

So here I am, writing to you today… I’m 20 years cancer free and still in and out of doctor’s offices. This time, the scale is a bit grander. Yet the focus remains the same: get patients great care.

• If you work in tech and are looking to move over to digital health, please reach out to us at people@pangeahealth.com. We’re hiring for engineering, sales, marketing, analytics and product design roles.
• If you work in healthcare and want to help some of the best and brightest in the industry get their products in front of physicians, please reach out to us at people@pangeahealth.com. We need your help.
• If you are a potential partner with an amazing healthcare product, please reach out at partners@pangeahealth.com.

Let’s go make a difference.