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 

Conferences

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.