Lessons from Rachel Blank, Allara Health, launching specialty care products in women’s health
Rachel Blank, CEO and Co-Founder at Allara Health, an all-in-one virtual care team for women with PCOS.
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Welcome back to the Pear Healthcare Playbook! Every week, we’ll be getting to know trailblazing healthcare leaders and dive into building a digital health business from 0 to 1.
This week, we’re super excited to have Rachel Blank, CEO and Co-Founder at Allara Health, an all-in-one virtual care team for women with PCOS.
Founded in August 2020 and based in New York, Allara wants to help women better manage chronic conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. It currently affects one in 10 women of childbearing age. Prior to founding Allara, Rachel was the Director of Strategy at Ro, where she launched their women's health brand, Rory. Rachel earned her MBA from Harvard Business School. In 2021, Allara raised seed funding from Virtue VC, GreatOaks and Humbition.
Rachel’s career path
With her mom working for health insurers and her dad an OBGYN, Rachel grew up around healthcare. She saw firsthand the impact that medicine could have, and after working in various startups, went to business school and saw how her passions for healthcare and business could combine. She was connected with the team at Ro and immediately was excited by the new age of digital health startups. After graduating Harvard Business School in 2018, at a time when telehealth wasn’t widely adopted, Rachel joined Ro early on. At Ro, she saw how digital health could help expand access to high quality care across the country.
Launching Rory, Ro’s first women’s health product
Rachel shares that their bigger vision at Ro was to be the first touchpoint and primary care hub for people in their health journey. Her role at the company was to expand from serving one health condition to a broader set of care needs— at the time, Ro only served men’s health, and Rachel successfully pushed to launch Rory, their women’s health brand. She shares that this was an invaluable experience, as she was able to gain experience starting something from the ground up while backed by the resources of a larger company.
Rachel shares that when thinking about which products to launch for Rory, they thought about treating a home/family. Rory launched with treatments for hot flashes, dryness, sleep, and eyelash growth. They thought carefully about what would be the best entry point wedge into the market, and Rachel shares that this was their vision when building Allara as well.
While at Ro, Rachel was also going through her own personal health journey with PCOS:
“I'd been diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome about 10 years ago, and for 10 years, and I really never found the care that I was looking for. I jumped from doctor to doctor, I would hear things like, ‘Well, you don't look like you have PCOS’ and have to get rediagnosed all over again, I would hear things like, ‘Just come back when you want to get pregnant,’ as if a woman's health care needs don't matter for the 15 years before she wants to get pregnant… that really was the impetus for Allara to build a specialty care platform in the women's health space.”
Rachel initially wondered if she could build her vision for Allara within Ro and quickly realized the specialty care business model would require a different platform. At the peak of COVID, she was spending a lot more time investigating her own personal health care needs and womens’ health as a whole. She recognized the whitespace surrounding women’s healthcare for chronic conditions and also saw the shift towards accepting telehealth on the provider side, and thus, took the leap to found Allara.
Allara is a collaborative care platform that pairs patients with a broad range of providers, including a medical provider like an OBGYN, NP, and a registered dietitian.
Rachel shares that 10-20% of the female population has PCOS, and PCOS manifests in other health conditions with women with PCOS twice as likely to have COVID and twice as likely to have severe outcomes from COVID. Similarly, women with PCOS are four times more likely to have diabetes. That being said, only about half of women with PCOS actually get a diagnosis, and it takes on average three years and multiple doctors to receive. Rachel doesn’t believe it's because you can’t see the symptoms— symptoms include excess weight gain, excess facial hair, irregular menstrual cycles, etc.— but these tend to get dismissed by doctors.
How it works: Allara runs a diagnostic test with extensive lab work, then pairs you with a doctor for a 30 minute visit to review your medical history and see what's going on, ordering an ultrasound if necessary. They take the time of diagnosis from three years and multiple doctors to one week and 1 30 minute virtual doctor's visit. PCOS still has not one FDA approved drug to treat it, and so Allara brings together as much information about managing symptoms as possible and acts as your home base for the condition.
Allara has a hybrid model where they charge patients a subscription fee for the services that includes their doctor's visits, and the nutritionist visits, labs and medication runs through insurance. Next, Allara is going in network on a fee for service basis. In the same way a GYN can charge for a visit, Allara would charge for visits, and they’re also exploring larger B2B sales contracts as well.
Allara’s big vision is to be the specialty care platform for women’s health
Rachel shares that Allara’s big vision is to be the specialty care platform for women's health and to treat all complex chronic conditions that affect women from PCOS to endometriosis to autoimmune diseases that disproportionately affect women. Allara will be launching their next condition within the next six months, likely endometriosis treatment, and then also thinking about making it more accessible to people.
Rachel shares that what they're doing with the direct consumer piece is getting data so that they can eventually go B2B and get insurers and employers to cover the often high costs. Allara wants to be able to cheaply and effectively prevent very severe and costly outcomes like diabetes or a NICU stay, which women with PCOS are much more likely to experience.
“I would say those two things: how do we treat more women with more conditions and get it into the hands of more women and have other people help cover the costs?”
The product-market fit journey in consumer healthcare
Speak to as many people as possible to understand what your users need.
“What do your customers care about, and what are they looking for?”
Rachel shares that Allara started in her apartment during quarantine: she put up an ad on Craigslist offering people $20 to talk to her, doing interview after interview of women with PCOS. She asked them about how they spent their money, their treatments, when they were diagnosed, and more questions about their PCOS journey. Not only was she trying to understand the patient, she wanted to test and iterate in a cost-effective and regulatory-abiding way.
The best way to test your product is to get it in the hands of customers as soon as possible and see how they respond.
With healthcare regulations, it can take six months to a year to actually be able to start seeing patients, but Rachel wanted to start iterating sooner:
Phase 1: Landing page testing. Rachel put up a waitlist and gathered info on what symptoms patients had, how much they’d be willing to pay, etc.
Phase 2: Consulting a nutritionist. A nutritionist with a PCOS care background found Rachel through Facebook ads and they began to hold informational nutrition sessions where Rachel could learn more about what patients wanted. When they were able to see patients, they conducted pilot tests manually with Zoom, Acuity, email, etc.
With this approach, Rachel wanted the team to prioritize testing and learning before building into the tech.
Rachel shares that if your product isn’t a great technical experience yet but people are still getting value out of it, that shows you how high the pain points are and how big the demand is.
Launching within an embedded brand might be easier, but starting from scratch means you can iterate faster and get your product out there.
While a brand like Ro would require more sophistication for a product launch, starting from scratch meant that Rachel had the freedom to iterate and test and throw things out there. Their first iteration of landing page testing with our waitlist was under a completely different brand.
How do you know when you have a product market pull?
“Are people willing to jump through a million hoops? Are they willing to go through a broken tech experience? If they're willing to go through all that, you probably have quite high demand for your product. For me, it was almost like, let's actually get it out really early and see if people still want it. That tells you kind of a lot more about product market fit than if you're putting something much more robust out there.”
Leverage organic communities and channels to test demand and build your audience.
Rachel shares that they followed the traditional direct-to-consumer playbook, running ads on Facebook and TikTok and getting more data on potential patients while building the waitlist up. These channels allowed them to start testing demand before actually offering the product.
Because many women see PCOS as a part of their identity, Rachel has seen a lot of people turn to Internet communities to try and find support. They were able to effectively build up very strong organic communities, with about 50K TikTok followers and a private patient community. Rachel shares that over half of Allara’s paid acquisition comes through organic channels.
You don’t need to stay in direct to consumer, but it can be an excellent launchpad
Rachel believes that traditional in-person care and virtual care each have their benefits. When it comes to chronic conditions, virtual care offers patient access and frequent touch points via video, messaging, etc. Rachel especially believes that with conditions that need more of a collaborative care model, direct-to-consumer is able to create a platform that bridges multiple provider types.
“We're not thinking about direct consumer as our only channel; we're thinking about it as kind of like one piece in this very big pie of— how do we create change in women's health care?
We think about us as a very multi touchpoint approach where we have the direct consumer channel that's building up demand… but that also means that once we launch with an insured employer, people will know about us.”
Rachel believes that building a trusted brand through consumer facing engagement is extremely important. Who pays for it is something that can iterate over time. For Allara, direct to consumer is more about having that direct relationship with patients.
Advice for Healthcare founders: don’t just Build, Learn!
Rachel’s found the healthtech industry to be incredibly rewarding. Her advice to aspiring founders: don’t just build, learn.
Especially in healthcare, you can't just build something that's dangerous to patients or isn't aligned with traditional health care incentive structures. For healthcare founders especially, take the time to learn through looking at other models of testing, customer interviewing, provider interviewing, etc. — be willing to invest time in learning before doing.
Interested in Allara or joining their team? Learn more on their website, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.