They advocate for menopause education.
By Shannon Cummings | May 2024
Last week, Academy Award-winning actress Halle Berry shouted, “I’m in menopause!” on Capitol Hill. She wasn’t performing a role though. She was advocating for the tens of millions of women like her— women who began perimenopause or menopause with insufficient medical information about what the journey might look like.
She joined a bipartisan group of female senators to push for legislation authorizing $275M for research, public health awareness activities, and education for healthcare providers.
A few days earlier and 150 miles up I-95, Archetype hosted Jill Angelo for a panel at The Union League of Philadelphia. Angelo, founder of Gennev, an exited Archetype portfolio company, and President at Unified Women’s Healthcare, shared about the importance of community and education for women in menopause.
Second from left: Jill Angelo shares how Gennev builds trust with women in menopause.
While Berry lamented the fact that, “our doctors can’t even say the word to us, let alone walk us through the journey,” Angelo spoke of the years of hard-won experience Gennev’s clinicians have in building trust with their patients.
When asked about how they built that trust, Angelo shared, “The fact that we listened was a trust builder in and of itself.” She went on to discuss the need to break through some of the cynicism women have in this space (and rightfully so, with 80% of OB-GYN residents unsure of how to discuss menopause with their patients).
Gennev’s model is carefully built around OB-GYNs and dieticians working together in an integrated care model that surrounds and cares for the whole person. Not only are they comfortable with saying “the m-word,” they are deeply invested in each patient’s well-being and health outcomes.
Screenshot: The Gennev Patient Journey from gennev.com.
While there isn’t currently a standard benchmark for proven outcomes in menopausal care, Gennev has data to back up their success in improving menopausal women’s quality of life. Angelo is starting to see their services being treated as “the well-woman exam for those in 45+ years of life.” Gennev is tracking menopause care as a preventative measure, using it as a springboard for encouraging patients to get mammograms and colonoscopies.
Furthermore, Gennev is looking at claims data to determine the inpatient, outpatient, and pharmaceutical costs of not treating women diagnosed with menopause. In one study, they saw a 15% reduction in behavioral health costs for women on hormone therapy. Gennev provides this and other data to employers and health plans as evidence for the importance of this care. Providing this sort of concrete evidence of success is critical for payor buy-in, ultimately contributing to access to care for more women.
If you want to learn more about how to address menopause in the workplace or how to support your employees, you can find additional Gennev resources here.
Inspired by Gennev’s groundbreaking solution to find other ways of making your employees happier and healthier at work? Reach out to Archetype at: hello@archetypegrowth.com
Shannon is Director of Operations at Archetype where she manages investment sourcing and investor relations. Prior to joining Archetype, she was a strategy consultant at Deloitte working primarily with public sector clients in health and development. Shannon has an MPP from Duke University, an MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler School of Business, and a BA from American University.