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TJ Farnsworth, Founder and CEO, Inception Fertility
Tammy Sun, Co-founder and CEO, Carrot Fertility 
Moderator: Siobhan O’Connor, Media Executive and Journalist


Brainstorm Health 2022 - Fertility Benefits: The New Frontline In Employee Retention 

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TJ Farnsworth, Founder and CEO, Inception Fertility
Tammy Sun, Co-founder and CEO, Carrot Fertility 


The New Frontline In Employee Retention 


Brainstorm Health 2022 - Fertility Benefits: The New Frontline In Employee Retention 


Hello everyone and welcome um this is such a timely topic for us to be talking about today and it's so broad in its impact as we know, astonishing changes have happened in the last decade. Plus from in improving access to family building benefits for employees. And now the stakes are high for employers to remain competitive at a time when workers have a lot more say on where they choose to work. So let's get right into it. According to various surveys, including one conducted by carrots. The vast majority of people said they stay at a company if they offer good fertility and family forming benefits. And even more said it would be a critical factor in attracting them to a company in the first place. This is even more true when we talk about younger workers with the competition for high performers stronger than ever. Why aren't more companies doing this? And what's your pitch to them that they must? Yeah. Hi, thanks so much for having me here today. You know, um I started the company just about six years ago and it's been absolutely astonishing to see the pace of change that has happened in this country and and frankly globally where global country company and um, I think the thing about benefits buying and um, HR leaders is they really care and respond to what their employees want and what are the programs and products that will engage their employees the most and in a way that drives health outcomes in Ry And I think over the past five years it hasn't just been that fertility benefits have moved into, you know, from a nature a nice to have into a must have, it's the breath of who is included in this aspect of healthcare. Um It's not just women, it's L. G. B. T. Q. People, it's men and males as we'll talk about today. Um who make up a critical aspect of of consumers of this type of health care. And so um it's really the velocity and the speed and and HR leaders are responding to huge demographic shifts that are happening in the country and as the payers of healthcare, right? As as those really on the front lines of innovating in ways to improve healthcare, employers are looking for clinical programs that will drive down costs and improve outcomes. So those are some of the key trends that we see in some of the key um you know, buying reasons T. J. I'll just let you build on that. Yeah. And I think it's it's one of those things where as a large employer, myself and you you look at all of us in the in the room here or challenge, we're trying to figure out how to recruit, retain quality employees and making sure that they see that you're thoughtful about what matters to them. And even if they're not a consumer of fertility services. Just a statement that you're making by actually having that as part of your benefits. I think it's just it's just critical to being able to compete in the marketplace for your staff. Um, I want to move on to inclusivity. But first I just want to let the production team know that the clock is not ticking. So we will we will need a human to keep us where we can just keep going for as long as you want to. Um So inclusivity is an increasingly important business imperative for leaders tammy. I know, carrot recently expanded into age inclusive hormone care areas. Can you briefly tell us about that sort of what you're offering and also bring us to bring to life? The why? Yeah. So, you know, when I did my egg freezing uh many years ago, a big part of the reason was because I was also diagnosed with primary ovarian insufficiency and early onset menopause. And um, you know, thinking about how to, as I as I mentioned, sort of the breath of who is included infertility healthcare has grown over the last several years. And I think we've made a ton of progress um in thinking about, you know, infertility and thinking about same sex couples and thinking about single intending parents. I think we still have a lot of good work to do in thinking about age inclusion and addressing ageism in the workplace and thinking about fertility health care. What are the fertility healthcare needs for people who potentially are in their post reproductive years. And so our mission has always been an inclusive one fertility care for all regardless of age or sex orientation. Excuse me, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or geography. And so this has been a really natural expansion into thinking um about how to be of service to more people. Mhm. T. J. I know 40% of infertility cases are related to male factor infertility by only focusing on women. We erase a large subset of the population that requires fertility services to build their families including those within the L. G. B. T. Q. Community or single aspiring parents. How does inception address that? Yeah, I think it's, I mean, as you said historically, my wife and I went through this and it was always thought of as You know, a women's health issue. And I think that that not just the fact that you're excluding a large portion of the population, you might need these services. But I think it also in a lot of ways puts the burden of this solely on one party. And you know, I think it's important that we realize that as you said, 40% of all of all of all infertility cases involved male factor and then you have L. G. B. T. Q. Patients that that um, you know, may sit outside of either one of those norms. And so I think when you're thinking about including fertility benefits and fertility services, it's it's not about making this about access for women. It's about making this access for all. And I think, you know to tammy's point about, you know, family planning benefits period. You know, one of the things we do is inception is include adoption benefits and things like that because everyone's pathway to parenthood might look a little different. It's important that we as as employers embrace whatever pathway to parenthood is right for employees. I want to talk about cost. But first since you just touched on it, I'm going to ask you a follow up question about your your personal story because I think it's really compelling and I think the room would like to hear about it. One thing that's so amazing about this conference is so many of you come to this work from such a personal place and I think it's inspiring to hear that from ceo. Yeah, I mean I I started the company um I was the ceo of an oncology business and my wife and I got married, we wanted to have a family and just like a lot of people who come to our clinics every day. We ended up in an infertility situation. And neither one of us grew up saying to ourselves, we can't wait to have ourselves our Children in a laboratory in the most unromantic way possible. That's where we, that's where we stood after 2.5 years of every type of infertility treatment. You can imagine three pregnancy losses and a lot of frustration and many tears. We said to ourselves and I said to myself as an entrepreneur, I said I think I can do this better. And so seven a half years ago we started the company and today it's the largest provider of fertility services in the north America. So it's been a fun journey. That's great. Tell me, let's hear your story, you know, I um I decided to pursue egg freezing just as it was becoming much more commercially available available. It was um long considered an experimental treatment and um you know, I mentioned before I went into the fertility clinic, I learned I had diminished you know, primary ovarian insufficiency uh and I wouldn't get many many eggs as part of this treatment, but it was important that I tried to pursue it because I was at high risk for early onset menopause. Um and you know every single part of my experience, my interaction with the with the fertility health care, so it was pretty poor um and very broken and I thought you know, this cannot just be something that people like me are are impacted by, started to really think about, well what are the different ways that same sex couples would hit this similar barriers. What are the ways that single intending parents would hit this barrier? And you know, I think we all agree now as probably as a society that you know fertility health care is a fundamental part of human health care. Um it's no longer considered a niche or a nice to have and um you know, saw an opportunity to build something that we thought could be fundamentally transformative and and bring tens of hundreds of millions more people into the fold. Thank you both for doing that. Um let's talk about costs. So even with benefits, costs remain prohibitive or at least extremely taxing for the people who avail themselves of these benefits. I'd love to you know, and we understand it's very widely reported that the cost to employee disproportionately affects women and LGBTQ people. Um at the same time, I know you both are thinking about interesting ways to address these issues T. J. Could you please first just give us a sense of the macro problem and then you can each take a turn and tell us what you're doing to address that. Yeah, I think it's important to understand that the demand for fertility services, this is very much a supply demand situation In that you've got a scenario where we're graduating roughly one fertility specialist position for every 11 million Americans every year. It is not sustainable. And we're seeing massive retirements from physicians. We're seeing shortages of of of the ability to supply care which obviously drives up cost. And so and a lot of things that we're doing are, you know using technology using innovative care models with physician extenders to try and increase capacity where thereby we can increase access and it's not just access in major cities. We think about access in places like you know the top tier cities, but you know, there are a lot of cities in this country, what I'll call flyover markets that actually don't have access to the fertility specialty care center at all. So there just isn't enough physicians to meet the demand of services that are ever expanding. Which is a good thing. Getting better care, better access to care is a is a great thing but we've gotta be able to meet that demand and in order to drive down access from a cost perspective as well. Great tammy, can you tell us about care cards? Yeah, so I think that this question is at the core of this challenge which is the cost and the the access problem in infertility. Healthcare is really fundamentally. First they cost problem. Um and I think we really need to expand our understanding which is what Kerry is doing of what access means and what it looks like. You know, there are really really important patient cases that need to be escalated into a surgical intervention like I. B. S. But there are also 1st and 2nd line interventions around concepts of appropriate care, medically appropriate care that really need to be understood and and presented as a complete and comprehensive solution that are less expensive that don't necessarily require physical presence and participation inside and are a fertility clinic with an R. E. I. So I think that's that's really the first thing in thinking about how to drive down costs is a more comprehensive appropriate care model. And then the second is, you know, so we have a technology called the carrot card. We have um you know, our own claims platform, We adjudicate process all claims and that has given us the flexibility to do important things that um expand care but also drive down costs. Obviously there's price negotiation that we do on behalf of our members, but we're also able to um you know, provide access for things that typically are not included. So access to donor material. Right? As an example um cross border care when it's appropriate for our global members adoption and NGC as you mentioned and all of the legal cost that that are related to that. A lot of people don't know that, you know, for a same sex couple after an an IVF experience, there may need to be in some cases an adoption process. Right? And so these things are not simple. They're, they're much more complex and they're becoming more more and more diverse as as um as it needs to. Sure, thank you very much. I think we have time for one question. There is and if not not seeing any hands going up um any final thoughts from either of you. This has been really rich. Thank you. I would just say, I think this is great to get the community of people that are thinking about innovative ways in which we can tackle big challenges within health care. I think that, you know, one of the things that we're all dealing with, in addition to the challenges we're dealing with and providing care to the patients that are in our clinics every day is how we recruit and retain quality employees. And you know, we're on the provider side of things. But businesses like carrot are really helping employers really try and figure out a way in which they can be inclusive and make employees understand how much they mean to their employer through benefits like this. Um, for about almost three years straight, we've consistently every week um surveyed, you know, hundreds of point, probably millions of members, 96, an average of 96 of members tell us that they are more likely to stay longer at their company because they have access to carrot or they're actively using carrot. And I think this is just speaks to sort of the power of um, you know, of building programs that speak, you know, that really resonate with employees and particularly as we're part of this, you know, great resignation and this trend. Um, I'm just so, so happy to see fertility healthcare come to the table as, um, you know, as a fundamental part of the healthcare staff, there's a lot more, there's a lot more work to do, but it's a really exciting moment. Inflection point. It is, thank you both so much.

As climate misinformation tactics continue to evolve, social media platforms and new technologies emerge as frontline defenses.

The urgency to combat climate misinformation

Environment

You have to take into account the fact that modeling has been wrong for 20 to 30 years, it's always been overestimating the amount of climate change that's actually taken place. A substantial number of have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. Anything we do now going to make any significant difference. What's happening here is there are people who have cultural, political, religious economic philosophies that they then invoke when they want to cherry pick one scientific result or another. It used to be that we would find lots of straight up climate denial. So climate change is a hoax. Um you know, it's a conspiracy, et cetera. Now we're seeing that these narratives have shifted from outright denial to something we call delay messaging and delay messaging is all about creating delay in climate action. So that messaging might suggest that particular solutions are in fact the way when we're a long way off having developed them, it might suggest that we in the West, so it shouldn't act until china and India have acted, for example, or it might suggest that certain groups are taking something away from another group or things that are going to cause a diversion and therefore also delaying climate action. If you think about miss informative content, it's often really salacious or really provocative, and that means it gets lots of engagement and get lots of shares and likes or dislikes, people agreeing or disagreeing with it. And that makes it really valuable content for the platforms. And you see it often flies through the recommendation algorithms very quickly. We look to see what is the extent of climate misinformation on the facebook platform, We took 195 known pages and groups That have published climate misinformation in the last 12 months And we analyzed a set of over 45,000 posts from those pages and groups by a crowd tangle. And we just looked at the extent of the climate misinformation from that. We found that there was an estimated between 818,000 and 1.36 million views of climate misinformation every single day. Climate misinformation from the worst pages grew 76.7% in the first nine months of 2021, so it's definitely growing in some sense. And what's more we found that only 3.6% of the content of the climate misinformation that we found has been fact checked, which is Facebook's other initiatives for combating climate misinformation, is to apply fact checking labels. So then the content is defunct in real time. So for Facebook to not recognize this is a bigger problem, It is huge. The technical definition of misinformation is that it's it's false information, but it's agnostic about the intent in the case of climate change, the outcome inevitably is delaying climate action. So the argument might be global warming isn't happening or humans aren't causing it or the impact won't be bad or the solutions won't work. But the conclusion is therefore we shouldn't act on climate change. now in order to adequately tackle misinformation, which is really complicated and interconnected. You need to take this holistic, interdisciplinary approach. So the four D project is a way of coming out misinformation from different angles, and the four Ds stand for detect deconstruct, debunked and deploy. First of all, you need to be able to detect the misinformation uh and detected quickly automatically ideally, because misinformation spread through social media so quickly. So we've trained a machine learning model to be able to automatically detect the different claims of misinformation. Then you need to ascertain the claims misinformation or not, and we use critical thinking methods to do that. Then you need to debunk them, which involves explaining the techniques used to mislead in misinformation. And lastly, having done all that work, you need to get that stuff out to the public. So what I think a lot of people don't understand is that advertising funds the internet, but this funding model is causing huge problems because it's actually incentivizing people to produce this information. So you've got people who actually can fund their entire operations or earn loads more than their peers because they're producing content that is so fallacious. And advertising next to increasingly, brands are recognizing that they don't want to be seen next to uh content that denies that climate change exists or that is showing doubt or conspiracy around climate action, which is essential because, you know, this kind of misinformation causes harm. They don't want to be seen next to what is seen as harmful content increasingly. And so if brands and advertisers pull advertisers pulled their money from particular platforms or particular newspapers or or from particular sites on google that will actually it will shift the information environment and what is profitable, definitely social media platforms should be doing more. And I think that acknowledges to whether it's flagging the misinformation posts or adjusting their algorithm so that they're less likely to go viral or penalizing repeat offenders or posting fact checking authority of information or pushing authority of information forward. There's lots of different tools and I think that should be using all of them. Climate communication science shows that when people see myths about climate change and its impacts or that it whether it exists or not, when people see that misinformation, they tend to uh they'll vote differently, they'll consume differently. They'll think differently about the climate. We can start to see the real world consequences of misinformation can be anything from undermining faith in democracy, undermining faith in the institutions and the processes that are so important to help us solve big things like climate change. And I think unless we get on top of this, we've got problems in the future when we try and create global or local solutions to some of the big problems that you know that we face as humanity, people often ask me and what can we do about climate change. And I think the most important thing we can do is just open our mouths and talk about it. We need to have climate conversations. We need to break climate silence in order to build the social momentum that leads to the political momentum that creates a real change. Mm hmm.

Stacy Janiak, Managing Partner and Chief Growth Officer, Deloitte
Alex Keith, Chief Executive Officer, Beauty, Procter & Gamble
Dr. Linda Livingstone, President, Baylor University
Tracey Travis, Executive Vice President of Finance and CFO, The Estée Lauder Companies
Moderator: Beth Kowitt, FORTUNE

MPW Summit 2020: From the Frontline - What It Means To Be A Leader In This Moment

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Executives are being tested like no other time in history as they navigate a pandemic and the growing fight for racial justice in the U.S.

The greater Seattle area experienced America's first case of COVID- 19, that was back in late January. Six weeks later, there is news of a second case in the Seattle area, the same county which is over board outside of Seattle. And that really set off A number of people worrying realising this disease was in the community already and it was spreading. The very next day, the area reported it's first death due to Covid 19. That was the first death in America due to the disease and it reported an outbreak at a nursing home facility. Just outside the city, it really took a toll very quickly and kind of signaled not only to Seattle but to the nation that COVID- 19 was here and really could cause a lot of damage and suffering. [ MUSIC ] With COVID- 19 we've really watched the whole country struggle with. This pandemic responding to the disease and having enough supplies. And it really showed weaknesses and supply chain, and in weaknesses and collaboration information sharing. What we've seen in Seattle, they also slow to respond, but we've seen the community come together Really, a response that draws upon many strengths that exist in the community that has a number of leading global companies. Seattle also has a number of really leading public and global health institutions. These resources and infrastructure really helped the city and I think. I think it's part of why it has responded fairly effectively to the pandemic and filling some of the gaps that existed, and that we've seen elsewhere in the country. So there are strong public health institutions, businesses, and the government all tend to work together. This existed before this pandemic in the form of the organization, Challenge Seattle which was started by Washington's former governor, Chris Gregoire. Challenge Seattle is about five years old now. It began kind of as a effort to provide some community leadership. We hadn't had some civic leadership in the greater Seattle area in some time. So these major companies, all the large international companies came together to kind of take a new view of what the problems were in the region. And add their skills, their technology, their new way of thinking, their innovation, to trying to solve those problems. We had had a dinner basically the preceeding week of our first death in the state. And as all the CEOs began discussing it, they said, how much would this grow? And I showed them some information that I had secured from a cancer center, the Fred Hutch Cancer Center. That showed it could be very dramatic. And so people left there that night very sober, trying to think their way through it. It wasn't that long thereafter that we had our outbreak at the nursing home that Friday night. And on Saturday, our first death so we had an emergency meeting of all the CEOs on Sunday, March 1 [ MUSIC ] We decided that, right then and there, we had to speak with one voice, as best we could. Because we represent about a quarter million employees. So, we wanted to make sure that we communicated as transparently as we could, with all of those employees, that we were saying the same thing. that it was based on facts and experts. Not a not an opinion or rumour, and that we would act in unison and so the messaging started to go out on Monday, and the big companies began taking action virtually right away on a voluntary Pretty basis kind of etting the tone and setting the pace for the entire business community. But they did it together, so that employees or one would not be spekeptical about why was something else going on with another large company. So they talked in unison and they acted in unison. The first question for everybody in Seattle area Was basically how far could go and how fast we should go in effect, encouraging people to stay home. And we went through this cycle over the course of about 72 hours from day one telling people that they should work from home if they felt more comfortable from Working from home to day two recommending to people that they should work from home today three telling people they should really work from home and shouldn't come to work at all unless they had a job that required them to do so. And what we also then quickly recognize was what we really needed to do was have not a conversation with the business community by itself, but a conversation that brought together the business community and the public leaders, perhaps most especially from the public health side of the county. Where Seattle is based as well as the state and only by really building on expertise data and this combined effort of the public and private sectors. Together with it, we have a better prospect of managing this successfully. [ MUSIC ] [ MUSIC ] You need to recognize that there are somethings that can only be done by the public sector. The private sector can help fill in the gaps. We have great logistical capacity especially in global companies with their supply chain infrastructure. And we can sometimes move more quickly than the public sector. So if you bring us all together and coordinate the right way, you can do so much more together than either group could ever even dream of doing by itself. And I think that's one of the key learnings here .>> At our noon briefings, we will always have a update from Local government and state government and it's during those occasions, that we've been asked whether we had any possibility that we could find the personal protective equipment, that our first responders and our healthcare community needed. And so we reached out right away, and immediately we had some of our companies. Who already had supplies coming in, they donated those to the state, then they used their supply chains to get more. And then as it spread, we began to look at new supply chains that they could get tips on. We created a procurement distribution, Dream Team, if you will, under our National Guard and that was comprised of Experts from two of our largest companies, Microsoft and Amazon. And so together we started to get that necessary supplies To our supply chain had procured a quarter of a million surgical masks, the so called A 95 masks that none of us had heard about six weeks ago. And so they had procured them internationally. They had gotten the support of the local government to let them go. They had been imported by FedEx into the United States. And they were literally sitting for three days in Memphis in a FedEx import control area, And they couldn't be released until somebody from the FDA came and signed a paper saying that they were fit to go. Everything was in order but there was no one from the FDA who was able to go. So in that case, I was alerted. This was about 5pm on a Saturday. And I reached out to people at the White House and specifically someone at the National Security Council. And by Sunday morning they had it taken care of and it was released by FedEx. We've gone beyond that now where they call on us frequently to do philanthropic things, whether it's food, which was yesterday or today, how do we get the word out uniformly? As to how one applies for unemployment compensation and can get it literally within five or six days, versus the unemployed person who's ill prepared and that delays the processing of their application. I have been so overwhelmed with the response by the business community. I mean virtually anything government asks for they begin the process of trying to make happen. It is a unprecedented public private partnership. Whatever disagreements there were yesterday are gone. Whatever competition may have been in place. Is it today, everybody is solely focused working as one. Trying to ensure that we return to public health safety and we get people back to work. So Seattle is definitely not out of the woods yet. Governor Jay Inslee has said that but, They have been successful at flattening the curve at really avoiding the worst case scenarios. So there's lots to be learned from the experience in Seattle and really how the community came together there. What was really key was how the private public and health sectors came together and really tried to coordinate a response. We've seen the country struggle with all sorts of resource issues, with supply chain issues. Just there are all sorts of gaps in our ability to respond to this pandemic but what we've seen in Seattle, was not ideal when a community comes together they can help fill some of the gaps [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

The companies found themselves on the frontlines of the first U.S. epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.

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