Welcoming Dr. Adaeze Enekwechi as Tia’s newest Board Member!

Tia's vision for a new paradigm for modern women’s healthcare requires putting women in the driver’s seat — both in the exam room and in the boardroom.

Put simply, catering to women as the most powerful customer in healthcare is step one, but not enough — we need to empower women to be shapers and architects of the healthcare system of the future. To get a sense of what’s “upside down” in our system, women represent more than 80% of the U.S. healthcare workforce, but hold less than 20% of leadership roles. And when it comes to Board representation, women hold only 11% of private company board seats, and just 3% are held by women of color.

With so few women and even fewer women of color represented in healthcare leadership and Board of Director positions, it’s no surprise that the healthcare system is failing to serve its most powerful customer.

Connecting lived experience with business experience

At Tia, we believe that lived experience and representation matters — that designing by and for women is a competitive advantage that underpins Tia’s authentic product and experience. We know women are not a monolith — that there are a multitude of female experiences shaped by identity, upbringing and daily life. We must ensure Tia’s own architects are representative of those we aim to serve. The lived experience is both a central tenet of Tia’s Care Model — we’re fixated on treating the whole person, not (just) the patient, symptom or ailment — and our approach to company-building.

With the opportunity to expand Tia’s Board of Directors, I set out to diversify both the lived experiences and the business experiences on our Board. Today, our all-women Board of Directors includes myself, my co-founder Felicity Yost, Threshold co-founder and Managing Partner Emily Melton, and Define Ventures founder and Managing Partner Lynne Chou O-Keefe. We are all patients first — each with our own set of trials and tribulations with the U.S. healthcare system — and women in business, second. As we enter a hyper-growth phase of the business and further our mission of building for all women and not just some, I was eyeing an Independent Director with deep expertise in health equity, policy, and payment model innovation across the public and private sectors.

When I met Dr. Adaeze Enekwechi, it was clear I’d found my match — a seasoned policymaker turned investor and operator who could further our mission-driven business goals at scale.

With a superpower for pairing “principles with practicals” and specifically, an approach to health equity that’s rooted in hard-working economics, Adaeze embodies the blend of lived and business experience Tia needs.

Welcome Adaeze to Tia’s Board of Directors!

I had the chance to ask Adaeze some questions about her experience across business, policy, and health equity and why we need to build a mission-driven business like Tia. Below are her responses.

You’ve had an incredible career that spans healthcare policy under President Obama, regulatory & budget management across a multitude of federal health agencies, and now as a healthcare investor and operator in the private sector. What has motivated you and guided your trajectory?

I have strived to focus on the important questions and the necessary inputs for solutions. In policy, as in business, there is so much noise and several shiny objects that can distract us. I’ve worked on addressing major health crises related to Zika, and the lead contamination crisis in Flint, for example. Both had devastating effects on whole communities including children and pregnant moms. Our approach to policy-making was focused on investing in the  right interventions like consumer education, access to health screens, and referrals for additional primary or specialty care, and ongoing engagement. I was also leading the broader work on advancing new payment models that build risk into how we pay for services. I layer on my professional training in community- or consumer-informed design for care solutions as a foundation for care delivery which we often miss. In these combined experiences there are critical lessons that help inform how I think about the new chassis for women’s health.

It feels that the healthcare system has (finally!) realized that women are the most powerful (yet underserved) customer in healthcare. What do you think has led to this industry mental model shift and what is the opportunity for Tia to seize it?

It's an evolution that is long overdue and a function of who has been invited to participate in venture-backed businesses to begin with. Now, the imperative to take care of patients with significant value placed on prevention, coordination, management, and patient experience is driving some of the investment activity around women’s health. Employers and payers are increasingly looking for risk-based models to drive efficiency, which adds to the urgency to get this right for half the population. Businesses that learn that women are not a homogenous group, and consequently design products and services to address the diversity among women in a value-based care environment will do very well.  And that’s what is most exciting about Tia: an understanding of the women they serve and a commitment to building out specific offerings to meet each customer where she is.

Company boards (both public and private) notoriously lack representation. Why is it important that we increase Board representation — at Tia and across the industry?

Boards, just like management teams, are better when there is diversity among its people. Diverse teams bring different lived experiences, training, and backgrounds into the conversation and increase the chance that we design something that is responsive to our clients or customers. We can give many examples, but in many ways it's obvious. A homogenous group of people with the same backgrounds is a blind spot—they may just not come up with different ideas or pathways that can enrich or inform an approach.