Introducing: Tia Care
Your one-stop-shop for female health — online & IRL
By Carolyn Witte & Felicity Yost, Co-Founders at Tia
What would healthcare look like if it were designed FOR women BY women?
This is the guiding question we’ve been asking ourselves since we started Tia and set out on a mission to transform healthcare through products, tools — and soon, services — that enable every woman to be her own patient advocate.
Since launching the Tia health advisor app last year, we’ve had more than 200,000 1:1 conversations with women about their sexual and reproductive health, giving us a front row seat literally and figuratively to everything that is working and not working in women’s healthcare today.
Through this unique lens, we’ve learned that:
Women don’t only want healthcare when something is wrong, but before it goes wrong.
Women want to be treated as whole humans with emotions (yes, real feelings!) — and not a disparate set of body parts or ailments.
Women want to know how and why their doctors make decisions — and not be told what to do without explanation.
And most exciting for us, we’ve also learned that:
Women don’t just want Tia before and after their doctor, but with their doctors.
More specifically…
Women don’t just want health information by Tia, but health care by Tia.
It is in response to these learnings that we are kickstarting efforts towards the latest manifestation of our vision: Tia Care, extending the loved and trusted digital relationship women have with Tia today into healthcare services — online and yes, offline, too.
Because you can’t get a Pap smear on the Internet.
As female founders , we’ve experienced time and time again the dreaded annual female rite of passage known as the Pap smear. But, it wasn’t until we found ourselves inadvertently coaching women through their Paps via Tia that we realized the extent to which the yearly “well-woman exam” is universally-hated (and all-too-often, avoided) by females everywhere. It is these moments in which we’ve witnessed the most intimate and vulnerable parts of women’s lives that have motivated us to create something better— a healthcare experience that is personal, compassionate, empowering, and designed explicitly through the female lens.
Imagine…
If when you walked in to your gyno for your annual well-woman exam, you were handed a robe (silk or fuzzy, you choose!) instead of a tissue gown?
And there’d be no clipboard nonsense in the waiting room, just a one-tap-to-share your health info (owned and controlled by you, of course) right from your phone:
The all-too-rare face time with your doc would be contextualized by your historical cycle, health & wellness data — sparking a meaningful conversation about your body as a whole (not just your pelvis!):
Post-pap, you could stroll down the hall to meet with a nutritionist or naturopath — a single, integrated female care team unified under one roof and one health record:
And a few days later, you’d get a ping on your phone with your test results in human-speak that you can actually understand…
(No premature cancer freak-outs at the Tia Clinic!):
And maybe, even… this whole new personalized, data-driven and sex-positive female health experience would come to you?!
Help us co-create the Tia Clinics.
Creating a new model of care that empowers every woman to make independent and informed decisions for her own body and life is too big of a feat to tackle alone. So we’re inviting you (healthcare providers, too!) to co-create the Tia Clinics with us from napkin sketch to brick-and-mortar — a healthcare experience we aspire to bring to women in cities across the country.
So, tell us:
What do you love about your care experience today and what do you hate?
What is “meh-but-tolerable” and what must change — like yesterday?
If you could wave a magic wand and design your own care experience from the waiting room to the procedure room, what would it look like and how would it make you feel?
Fixing women’s healthcare is bigger than anyone one of us; we need you as our co-pilots to bring our collective vision to life.
So, join us.
And tell us, what does the future of women’s healthcare look like to you? #GynoGoals
