A story of The Verge referred to Kindbody as the “SoulCycle” of fertility, pointing out that it sells fertility services and empowerment to 25-year-olds. It’s a bit far, but I can see how the company compares to The Wing’s aesthetically driven facade.
Kindbody doesn’t just sell a dream to belong, though – there’s a big focus on the consumerism of patient care. By focusing on helping his patients feel in control of their fertility journeys, Kindbody tries to fit into the lives of those who want to conceive.
“When you build a business, you have to think about how consumers behave today and what has changed in the last five years, ten or fifteen years,” said Gina Bartasi, founder and president of Kindbody. “And consumers crave and receive content.”
She recognizes how different space is now compared to when she was going through her own fertility journey.
“I think the hardest part is adapting, whether it’s adapting the media or adapting to healthcare,” she said. “You have to constantly have this circle and loop back with your customer and customer behavior and how that changes. And in healthcare, your customer is of course the patient.”
Over the past decade, our lives have changed exponentially thanks to easy access to information through social media platforms, and the COVID-19 pandemic only added a sense of perpetual uncertainty. Businesses closed for months at the peak of 2020, schools have fluctuated between mandating physical attendance and holding virtual classes across the country, and offices that once banned remote working have been introduced in hybrid setups like “hoteling.”
“The majority of patients need flexibility in their schedules,” Bartasi said. “I think historically in healthcare the patient did what the doctor did, what the doctor told them to do, and with Kindbody, the patient is in charge, not necessarily the doctor.”
You can see this approach in almost all Kindbody services. Kindbody not only wants to cater to the way its potential patients go about their lives, it also wants them to have a familiar experience. Open the Kindbody website and you’ll find a subdued, easy-to-use landing page with photos of well-designed offices and social media links. It’s a well-known look for the 2020s right now, and that’s intentional.
Ultimately, you can have the best technology and the best data, but [patients] are still at home crying; it sucks and [they] can’t get out of bed in the morning. Barbara Collura, President of Resolve
With both B2B and B2C revenue streams, this company seeks to significantly disrupt women’s healthcare by focusing on education, helping patients feel cared for, and providing solutions to major pain points through employer-provided benefits.
As Bartasi mentioned in part 1 of this TC-1, she felt like she was being treated like a subordinate to the doctor during her fertility journey, and her team at Kindbody has done a lot of work to prevent that.
“It really is a broken system”
Due to the nature of their relationship with space, both Bartasi and Dr. Fahimeh Sasan, Kindbody’s current chief innovation officer and an experienced board-certified OBGYN, familiar with the challenges of the fertility journey from two different perspectives: the patient and the provider. They found that the overarching challenge that ultimately complicates every step of this process is the fragmentation of care.
dr. Fahimeh Sasan, Kindbody’s Chief Innovation Officer. Image Credits: friendliness
“It’s really a broken system, and it’s a system that in no way, shape or form is based on proven human health or being proactive,” said Dr. sasan. “It is a 100% reactionary system. I’ve learned that you wait for a woman to prove she’s not fertile and she needs to prove her infertility diagnosis before you start testing and see if that’s the problem.”
This reactionary approach is something she always felt needed to be corrected. She gives examples of how other conditions or potential health problems are addressed with the aim of prevention rather than cure.
“You do stress tests so that someone doesn’t have a heart attack. We do mammograms to detect breast changes before someone has breast cancer.” But when it comes to infertility, patients have to prove they’re experiencing it before it can be addressed. She believes that education and then healthcare have not caught up with the technology available to patients.
“If you think about the progress that has been made in this area, whether it be the first egg freezing or hormone testing, such as for the anti-Müllerian hormone, and even the possibilities of ultrasound and ultrasound, then the doctrines have not changed. †