Helping Consumerize Health Insurance — Full
Sally Poblete, Founder & CEO of Wellthie, chats about her mission, how the Affordable Care Act has given the insurance industry an opportunity for disruption and keeping a positive mindset through the process.
Key takeaways from this episode of StartUp Health NOW can be found here.
[00:04] Unity Stoakes: Welcome to StartUp Health Now! The weekly web show that celebrates the Healthcare Transformers and changemakers reimagining health. My name is Unity Stoakes and today we are at the Wearable Tech and Digital Health Conference in New York City. We’ve got a very special guest, Healthcare Transformer Sally Poblete, who is the CEO and founder of Wellthie. Stick around. It’s going to be a great show.
[00:29] Intro Music
[01:06] Unity: Welcome Sally it’s great to be with you here again today. I thought we’d start by learning about your mission the Wellthie mission and what you’re focused on at Wellthie.
[01:17] Sally Poblete: Sure. Thank you so much for having me Unity and perhaps I’ll start by just mentioning that I’m a former health insurance executive from Anthem. Also a licensed insurance broker and despite my industry expertise like most people out there I found the process of choosing and buying insurance to be quite cumbersome.
[01:36] Sally: I set out to make this process using technology simple design and a focus on education to be much more simple and engaging for businesses and individuals. What we offer is a modern and smart marketplace whereby businesses and individuals with the help of their broker can find the most affordable insurance for them. We license this technology to insurance carriers and brokers who are eager to have engaging and effective e-commerce marketplaces.
[02:08] Unity: What’s the model? Is it in the clouds, Saas model?
[02:12] Sally: It is in the clouds, It’s Saas. It can be white labeled to our customers. They could be insurance companies and we have several already to date as well as large brokers who are eager to get into the retail environment and offer a really modern e-commerce experiences for their customers.
[02:32] Unity: Why are we seeing so much innovation today specifically in the insurance industry? It seems like there’s a big need but what’s going on today? What are the conditions and why is it so needed?
[02:47] Sally: Insurances are a really interesting industry. First of all, it’s gigantic. There are almost a trillion dollars in premium in the health sector alone. Second when you think about insurance you often think about managing risk and regulation. Those two things are not at all synonymous with innovation and disruption. Third, it’s a very old Industry. It’s at among the fortune 500 companies who are insurance. In the insurance industry the average age is 95 years old.
[03:24] Sally: This old huge and what we believe is you know largely unaddressed in terms of technological innovation is ripe for lots of creativity simplicity and innovation today.
[03:41] Unity: Why now? Was there an ah-ha moment? you spent so many years as an executive in the industry was there something that you saw? Either the macro conditions changing or something maybe very specific that sort of gave you that aha moment that you had to start Wellthie?
[04:02] Sally: Yeah. So, again back to regulation in the market forces. The Affordable Care Act as you know has broad significant market expansion to people buying insurance and needing insurance because they are required to do so by the Affordable Care Act. Secondly, the Affordable Care Act has brought more transparency in standardization in the way that insurance prices are determined where previously that was pretty opaque and you know kind of in a black box. The third is that the industry has gone retail and to be a successful retail one must engage the end consumer and it’s no longer sufficient to have a strong brand as an insurance carrier to also be a successful retailer.
[04:52] Sally: Last but certainly not least we are in the age of the digital consumer where we all are used to seamless 24–7 convenient experiences in all aspects of our lives and so expect that from purchasing insurance as well. Yet, we rely on and benefit from the help of experts who help make this very big important purchase a confident one. So, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Wellthie’s mission to simplify and modernize the process but also help the experts in the form of brokers and other intermediaries support their customers.
[05:37] Unity: It’s so Interesting. So, basically at the heart of this challenge here is we’ve got this legacy industry as you said that’s been around for a hundred years and longer. It’s very complicated in the entire way they’ve been selling, is completely changing. I’d be interested to know. Who do you think is going to crack this code? Obviously, Wellthie is focusing on it but what are the ingredients needed to be able to really simplify this very complex business?
[06:17] Sally: Yeah. So, we think that one of our key strengths and differentiators is that we are industry experts who have come out of this complicated, nuanced industry and innovating from essentially within and partnering with those incumbents to help Innovate. We think that that domain expertise coupled with the rest of our team’s technology and innovation expertise are the key ingredients to making a change. Our mission is in our team’s passion for doing this, is so strong, but at the same time, we have a healthy respect for the regulation in the nuance frankly. The differences in the markets and the distribution channels and the products that often are overlooked by pure tech companies who may not realize just how entrenched and how complicated the existing system is. But because we understand that we have a good grounding in the opportunities to pick first and where to innovate next.
[07:27] Unity: So it sounds like your strategy is more of a collaborative, focus on collaboration with industry from the beginning as opposed to completely going around like many technology companies sort of do in healthcare?
[07:42] Sally: Yeah I think so. I think that collaborative approach has really been a key to our success. We count today in terms of our customer’s insurance companies who have leveraged our technology and are now leading in terms of their own innovation, and as well as working with brokers small businesses and individuals. So I think that that’s a great way to put it and really proud of the way that we’ve approached the industry today.
[08:13] Unity: What has your experience been? Just shifting gears a little as a female founder CEO in this industry, specifically, both from a technology perspective of the industry but also the insurance industry? What’s your experience been like as a female founder?
[08:28] Sally: Yeah. We need more female founders. I’ll say that. There are not very many women CEOs or entrepreneurs within the tech insurance and healthcare arenas. Yet what’s really stark contrast is that eighty percent of all healthcare decisions in the family are made by women. So, having the female mindset operating within a male-dominated world I’d say has been an opportunity for us to differentiate and I’ve been using it as really a source of strength rather than a barrier to us and growing the company.
[09:13] Unity: Wonderful. Do you have any advice? There’s a wave of new entrepreneurs always coming into this sector which is very exciting. Do you have advice for these new entrepreneurs coming into the health sector or lessons learned maybe that you can share? For those just getting started?
[09:34] Sally: Yeah. Two things come to mind often when I reflect upon the journey so far and that is that I used to think I had to have the perfect idea or all of the resources or things in place in order to start a company and what I’ve learned through the journey is that so much has been certainly having a focus and having a mission is very important but so much of how we’ve approached the market has been in response to the feedback from our customers and the experiences we’ve had. So, it’s been more iterative than having everything right from the get-go.
[10:11] Sally: So I’d say to the aspiring entrepreneurs out there to take the plunge. To go out there and take the first step and I think there’s no substitute to actually hearing and listening to market feedback to tweak and perfect that and get that product market fit.
[10:33] Sally: I think the other thing more so I’d say the things that I try to share with my own children is building resilience and practicing resilience every day because the constant onslaught of challenges and change and rejection and lots and lots of other difficulties on the road to entrepreneurship require a soft healthy dose of resilience and frankly gratitude for the accomplishments that we’ve got me to date.
[11:12] Unity: One of the big challenges as you alluded to all these ups and downs as an entrepreneur. What do you do personally to keep a positive mindset or maybe hobbies that you do to have fun and sort of get through the challenging times of your journey?
[11:32] Sally: Yeah. Those ups and downs really are a part of life. I’d say I’m proud to have two inspiring daughters and I think them and my husband are what balances me every day and when I get home and know that they’re happy and healthy and that the home life is good. That really provides good perspective that the ups and downs of entrepreneurship like parenthood are just that and there’re more highs than there are low so life is good.
[12:10] Unity: Wonderful thank you so much for everything that you do. It’s great to be with you here today and thanks for your time.
[12:15] Sally: Thank You Unity.
[12:16] Unity: Thank you, we’ll see you soon.
[12:21] Chime
