Matt Lenz is the Chief Growth Officer for Posterity Health, a place where males go to manage their fertility—and the only digital male fertility platform that empowers men to learn about their fertility and take action.
kozēkozē founder and CEO, Garrett Kusmierz, has been friends with Matt for 25 years. After a year of trying to conceive with no luck, Matt helped her along the journey by getting her husband, Jeff, access to testing.
Fertility awareness is an important pillar of Garrett's personal life, but also a part of our mission at kozēkozē as it's step one on the perinatal journey. Many women try for months and months, beating themselves up, when there's a 50 percent chance that it's their partner's health.
Learn more about men's infertility, fertility as a biomarker for overall health, and more!
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Q: As an unmarried, childless man, what made you want to join Posterity Health as the Chief Growth Officer?
A: I studied Biology and Business at Indiana University. As I was exploring the professional world and trying to understand what I wanted to do with my career, I had an opportunity to work for a company called HealthMEDX, which was a post-acute electronic medical record company. I was fortunate enough to move out to Colorado and work as an application specialist, consultant and, ultimately, an account executive selling electronic medical records into senior living homes. So, I got the first foray into healthcare looking at the process, saw how broken it was, saw how costly it was, and saw how complex the insurance and continuity of care journey for people going through the healthcare system was.
Fortunately, we ended up selling that company to a bigger post-acute company focused on behavioral health called Netsmart Technologies—and it really started to paint the picture of bringing mental and behavioral health together with senior living. I saw the continuity of care. I saw the impact that technology and data and overall great patient care can bring to the healthcare system.
Then, I got an interesting opportunity to work for a company called Livongo Health, the leader in diabetes management selling a diabetes management software focused on remote patient monitoring and digital health and, ultimately, empowering the consumer to have better patient and member satisfaction, improved clinical outcomes and, ultimately, save money for both the member and the self-insured employer.
As we thought about the impact of chronic conditions, we understood that chronic conditions don’t exist in silos. Most people with diabetes have hypertension, weight management issues, prediabetes, cardiovascular issues and, ultimately, we found that they are also dealing with mental health issues due to the stress of having to manage a chronic condition 24/7/365.
So, we built a hypertension product, acquired a diabetes and weight management program and then, ultimately, acquired a mental health solution and built it all into a whole person care offering and sold it to large, self-insured employers and ASO Health Plans.
I got a lot of experience looking at technology and how technology can impact the patient experience and improve the overall healthcare journey. We ended up taking that company public in 2018. It was the most successful IPO in digital health, and ended up selling the company in 2020 to a firm called Teladoc Health.
So, we took our remote patient monitoring solutions for chronic conditions and Teladoc’s telemedicine solution that focused on virtual care and brought them together to, ultimately, provide virtual primary care that focused on getting members into the funnel earlier for overall preventative care.
If you think about primary care and the importance it has on the overall healthcare system to get to patients earlier, what we ended up finding out was that virtual primary care can be a digital front door for people with other conditions. So, you could immediately look at A1C, cholesterol, blood pressure, and any other conditions that a member was dealing with and, ultimately, get the right care at the right time to those members with other solutions we had in our system.
Teladoc Health was a publicly traded company. They’ve acquired several companies and have built out this solution that can really serve the entire patient journey from primary care to chronic conditions to mental health and expert medical opinion.
As I was evaluating my next career move post-acquisition, there were three areas that really stood out to me in the self-insured employer market and what conditions self-insured employers were focused on. Those were musculoskeletal, mental health, and fertility.
I was thinking about not having kids yet, not being a woman on the female health journey, and started to explore if there were any male fertility solutions out on the market. The CEO at Posterity Health called me and asked if I wanted to come over and lead the sales team.
As I think about the opportunity to make a huge impact, something that has brought me back to a mission-driven company is extremely powerful. We’ll talk about the importance of early evaluation of the male but, ultimately, I saw this as an opportunity.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, healthcare primarily was all brick and mortar. You had to go into a doctor’s office. You had to go into established care. There was no telemedicine. During COVID, digital health and virtual care became everything. So, what we kind of see in the market is that digital health and virtual care accelerated ten times during COVID due to the demand that the healthcare consumer put on the technology and the ecosystem.
What we’ve seen is the pendulum swing back to more of what we call a hybrid care of delivery model where you can employ physicians, but also take care of that patient from A-Z—an initial telehealth consult to the treatment plan and in-person care with employed physicians. That’s really what attracted me to Posterity Health, and hoping to disrupt another industry that is confusing, complex, and costly in the fertility world.
Q: How did Posterity Health get started, and what was the process?
A: Posterity Health has a really unique founder’s story. I’m really excited to be able to work for CEO Pam Pure and our Chief Medical Officer Dr. Barrett Cowan. Pam Pure has been a healthcare titan. She’s worked for several large companies. She was the Executive Vice President of McKesson’s technology firm. I worked for her in my first job out of HealthMEDX. She has been a pioneer in private equity physician practice roll ups. Dr. Barrett Cowan is one of the most well-known and renowned reproductive urologists in the state of Colorado.
So, during COVID, Pam was doing a war room for her private equity portfolio companies trying to understand how to turn these physician practices to a digital, virtual-first practice so they could continue to see patients. Dr. Cowan was down the hall trying to figure out how to see his fertility patients and not disrupt any continuity of care. So, I think the story is that they walked out of their separate offices during COVID and said I think we have a business model here.
Our mission is to provide more affordability and accessibility for all males trying to conceive a child. What we find to be very interesting and why men aren’t tested until well into the infertility journey is because one, there’s an access issue and, two, there’s less than 200 fellowship-trained reproductive urologists in the country—and 70 are employed at an academic medical center.
So, what we find is it’s about three to six months to even get into a fellowship-trained reproductive urologist
Something else that we’ve seen recently is there’s been so much coverage and focus on women’s rights and women’s health that, sometimes, we forget that it’s a couple’s issue. We put this female through so much testing. We prod them. We make them go to doctor’s appointments. Hey, it’s a female’s issue. But, what’s extremely interesting is that one in six couples today are facing infertility issues—and 50 percent of the time, it’s a male factor.
So, because there’s a lack of reproductive urologists and because there’s a lack of education and awareness in moving that female through the fertility journey without testing the male, unfortunately, what we find is that our males are not evaluated until 22 months into the fertility journey.
We believe that Posterity Health can ultimately change the fertility industry to provide simultaneous evaluation of a couple. So, at month three, as the female is going through her initial testing on her fertility status, the male should ultimately do a semen analysis or, what we call, a biomarker for men’s health. What’s extremely interesting about the semen analysis is one, technology has improved—so, instead of having to go into a clinic to present your sample, we now have at-home diagnostics that are integrated with a fellowship-trained reproductive urologist to actually do your results review. So, we’ve provided better access to care through at-home diagnostics and technology.
But what we find and what’s interesting is that about ten percent of the time we find an abnormal semen analysis, we have an underlying health condition—whether that’s testicular cancer, pituitary issues, hormonal issues. So, we’re really starting to see a trend in the industry where male fertility is ultimately a biomarker for men’s health.
We see a huge opportunity as we know that 55 percent of our males don’t get regular health screenings, so we can ultimately use the fertility of those patients between 25 and 32 to get them into the healthcare system sooner because we are the first physician they are seeing since their pediatrician. So, when they’re doing their initial semen analysis, we’re also doing blood work and taking vitals so we can identify A1C, high cholesterol, high blood pressure. If we can get those patients, males in particular, into the healthcare journey sooner, we think there’s a huge opportunity to see significant savings from a preventative care perspective down the road.
In our infancy, we have three different components of our business model. One is what we call “provide care.” Since Posterity Health is a virtual-first center of excellence for end-to-end male care and we offer a hybrid care delivery model powered by our male management platform, we’ve ultimately created a center of excellence for men’s health and male care with employed fellowship-trained reproductive urologists. So, it’s a unique opportunity because we can take referrals from our “provide care” network and actually get male referrals from a reproductive endocrinologist, an OBGYN, a urologist, a primary care physician, and those patients are automatically referred to us from those physicians.
There’s also a direct-to-consumer element to being able to get more patients and having the best physicians across the country. So, we look at our markets of where we have physicians, we do advertising for vasectomies and vasectomy reversals, and make sure our physicians have a great presence in those cities.
Then, we also have a “pay-for-care” vertical, which is your self-insured employers, your health plans, your fertility benefit managers. So, kind of coming full circle, when we started the company, we had a unique opportunity to partner with two of the largest fertility benefit managers across the country who have primarily been focused on women’s health and female fertility for the last ten years. They saw an opportunity to be innovative and selected Posterity Health to be their national in-network and preferred reproductive urology group.
So that’s kind of how Posterity got started. There was a need to scale nationally. I came into the company and, ultimately, spent the first year of my career at Posterity building out our fertility center network.
So, what Posterity has done that is extremely unique is that we went out and contracted with 180 of the leading fertility centers in the country, and we’re already working with about 30 percent of the total REIs in the country. So there’s about 1,700 total REIs in the country, and we’re working with about 500 of them in the first year-and-a-half, two years of the company, which is extremely impressive.
There was an appetite to do something different, and there was an appetite to disrupt the way that males and females go through the fertility journey. Why the fertility clinics were attracted to working with Posterity Health is because, one, we were in-network with the fertility benefit managers to ultimately sell into the self-insured employer so they had access, but two, we really kind of flipped the traditional male fertility journey and model on its head.
Posterity Health created what we call “Integrated Couples Care.” Historically, when you think about a couple going into a fertility center, the female is being seen by an REI. If that male has to get a semen analysis and it’s abnormal, they’re getting sent out to a urologist or reproductive urologist that could be thirty miles away—and you’re receiving care from two different physicians and two different entities. They’re not communicating, and you’re creating a very fragmented care journey for that couple.
So, what we did was we created a virtual-first model where 80 percent of our visits can be done via telehealth. But what is unique about Posterity is that our physicians actually travel to the fertility center to see the couple under one roof. So, we’ve created a lot of value to the fertility center and the couple. Our doctors now see the male under the roof. We accelerate the care. We see our patients within 72 hours rather than three to six months.
Also, by providing integrated couples care, we also see better clinical outcomes. If a male patient ends up needing a sperm extraction, which is now covered by fertility benefits, we can actually do that sperm extraction inside the fertility center and use the fertility center staff like an embryologist to look at the sample in real-time. As we know, if you’re working alongside the embryologist, we can ultimately see better outcomes and less IVF cycles. So, it’s a really unique opportunity to be able to imbed ourselves into the fertility center and become an extension of their team.
Another interesting component of why the fertility centers have wanted to partner with Posterity Health is there’s not enough male patients that come through the system for a fertility center to have a full-time reproductive urologist on staff. So, we’ve almost created a fractional reproductive urologist model, where we go on-site one time a month and see all of their males at that one time, do all of the procedures, then we go home. So, we’ve really provided a huge opportunity in some of the rural areas that don’t have a reproductive urologist and are sending male patients three hours away to be seen.
We took a client’s male timeline from six months to a month, and that’s really important because as you think about a couple going through IVF, we’re ultimately accelerating that fertility journey by getting the male through the system faster—and that’s a big challenge we face today because many of the males that should be sent out are not sent out because you don’t want to delay IVF and you don’t want to risk the couple to fixing the male or them going to another fertility center at the recommendation of a reproductive urologist. So, that’s the model that we’ve totally flipped on its head to provide this integrated couples care component at 180 fertility centers across the country.
Q: When you went to employers to educate on the male side of things, were they shocked or did they understand it?
A: A self-insured employer is actually at-risk for their employees’ healthcare expenses. So, anytime a person is using their healthcare through a big employer like Dell or Microsoft or Target or any self-insured employer for that matter, the employer is ultimately paying for that healthcare.
So, we’ve seen this big shift in the last several years—ten to fifteen years—where digital health has come out where everybody’s really focused on three different buckets. It’s the member satisfaction—how can we provide a better healthcare experience for our consumer, how can we improve clinical outcomes and, ultimately, if you can do both of those things, we fundamentally believe you can save money for both the couple and the employer.
So, when we first started to pursue fertility benefit managers, they kind of looked at us like we don’t need male care. Fertility is a female issue, and we’re only going to cover the female. So, while they're innovative and providing fertility benefits, what’s kind of happened in the last ten to fifteen years in the fertility world is a lot of self-insured employers used to offer fertility benefits through major medical. So, you’d get essentially a forty thousand dollar lifetime max and that was for your fertility benefits.
What’s happened though is that self-insured employers have started to carve out fertility benefits and select fertility benefit managers to ultimately manage their family-forming benefit design. They create a network of the top fertility centers, they require certain outcomes to be reported year over year, they decrease NICU costs, etc, and that’s why they’ve started to carve these benefits out.
It’s also a talent acquisition, a talent retention, a DEI strategy that the self-insured employer has taken in the last ten years, and it really accelerated in 2020 during COVID to make sure that all self-insured employers had a fertility benefit manager. But only 40 to 50 percent of all self-insured employers today have a fertility benefit manager.
So, going back to where we’re at in terms of covering male care, we were turned down several times. But, with polite persistence and being relentless, we ended up getting those fertility benefit managers and we had several champions within those fertility benefit managers really thinking about the male, really thinking about simultaneous evaluation for the couple, and really championing and using their voice to promote that fertility is a couple’s issue.
So, what we’ve seen is that the first several fertility benefit managers have actually started to cover all male care. So, that includes labs, diagnostics, and procedures. Traditionally, commercial health insurance has not covered anything underneath male infertility. Actually, when you put an infertility diagnosis for a male on their chart, they no longer have coverage for these services. So, for a fertility benefit manager to cover labs, diagnostics, and procedures—and most of those procedures are what we call a sperm extraction where you actually do a microsurgery to go into the testicle, take sperm out, and put it into the egg to create the embryo.
So, what we’ve seen is a significant shift in males now having coverage, more males are being seen, and now we can actually improve outcomes by covering these sperm extractions and not having to continue trying to increase your IVF cycles if they’re not successful. So, it’s been a huge step in the right direction to providing health equity in the fertility world.
Now, while that’s great, unfortunately what we find is that a lot of the males still aren’t being sent out at the fertility center. So, what we see in the market and why we’ve strategically hired several people in the self-insured employer space is because, traditionally, as we talked about one in six space in fertility and fifty percent of the time it’s a male factor, but the male is not tested on average until 22 months into the fertility journey. So, too often what we find is that the first semen analysis or test that the male is doing is when the couple is already at the fertility center.
So, while covering male benefits from a fertility perspective is great, we’re still not addressing the root cause of testing the male earlier in the fertility journey to really take the burden off the female. So, if you think the female is going through 22 months of trying and medication and appointments and prodding and probing. We believe that self-insured employers are the way to give this simultaneous evaluation of a couple through promoting a male preconception consult to their employees.
What we’re finding is, when you think about fertility, it’s expensive. Not to mention all of the appointments, the cost that it takes over those 22 months, the time away from work, the absenteeism, etc, so what we’re finding and kind of looking to do with the employers is actually get them to start promoting the simultaneous evaluation of the couple and use our at-home diagnostic that includes a result review to send that at-home semen analysis test to the male at month three. And, our hypothesis is if we can get to the male earlier in the fertility journey, we ultimately can provide the least-invasive, most cost-effective path of pregnancy. And that’s our ultimate goal when you think about fertility in general.
If you look at the overall population and the methodology of cost savings or cost avoidance, if fifty percent of the males are male-factor infertility, 36 percent of those men can be impacted by Posterity Health or be treated earlier in the fertility journey.
The stat that I don’t think we talk about the most is that eleven percent of those males are what we call azoospermic, and that means that they have zero sperm and have zero percent chance to conceive a child naturally. So, eleven percent of the males of male factor infertility will never be able to get their partner pregnant naturally. So they are now spending 22 months trying, when it’s the male.
Q: Talk about male fertility as a biomarker of men’s health and the future of what fertility can look like.
A: I think I’d go back to where we left off that eleven percent of males that are azoospermic could be accelerated right to IVF and cut out 22 months of healthcare waste and, unfortunately, shouldering the care from the female. But what’s also interesting is that 25 percent of those males can also go on a simple three-month hormone regimen like Clomid and HCG to ultimately improve their sperm quality and increase their chances of natural conception.
We did a small population study and, when we put these males through this three-month hormone regimen, we increased natural conception by 150 percent. So our goal at the end of the day is to be able to provide more affordable and more accessible fertility care for all.
But I think one thing that we’re finding in the market and where self-insured employers are starting to really think about their benefits is to require a preconception consult for the male before authorizing IVF benefits. Because if you think about the employer spending $30,000 to $40,000 for an IVF cycle, even by avoiding two cycles of IVF, that employer is saving $100,000 and they’re doing the right thing for the couple.
So, we’re really starting to see this pendulum swing back to the self-insured employers where they’re really exploring this preconception consult to potentially require a male to be tested before they authorize those fertility benefits.
What’s really interesting is the clinical governing bodies of OBGYNs, which is ACOG, and the governing body of reproductive endocrinologists, which is ARSM, recommend that the clinical gold standard is to test the male at the beginning of the fertility journey. Unfortunately, that’s not happening. But that’s where Posterity Health and other companies that are talking about innovation and talking about men’s health and male fertility can really start to change the industry.
I really think about this similarly to orthopedic surgery. So, twenty years ago, you had a disc fusion, or a shoulder issue, or knee issue, you went right to the orthopedic surgeon. A lot of times, you had a hospital readmission where you’re doing another disc fusion ten years down the road. Ultimately, what ended up happening was digital musculoskeletal companies like Hinge and Sword and several others in the self-insured employer market said well, wait a second, there is a less-invasive, more cost-effective, and better outcomes that can be proven through six to nine months of virtual PT to improve your condition and not have to go through a surgery. Ultimately, what employers started doing was requiring a prior authorization of somebody to go through that process before they authorize a surgery, and they’ve seen great outcomes.
So, in a perfect world, I foresee a future where employers have equal male and female fertility benefits and they have equal male and female end-to-end family forming benefits that treat the couple the same. That’s the ultimate goal because, you’re ultimately going to save the couple time and money and prevent unnecessary healthcare waste that the self-insured employer is paying for that could ultimately be avoided if the right care was taking place at the right time. So, that’s kind of our vision for the future of what we see happening in the industry. The self-insured employers are so important because 65 percent of all Americans are covered by a self-insured employer.
One other thing that we are starting to see to be very interesting is there’s a lot of state mandates coming out. So, the state of Illinois has passed a bill that has essentially said that if you’re an employer with over 25 employees, you’re required to cover IVF without a cap. So, we’ve had a lot of brokers and benefits consultants come to us and say hey, we’d like to put a checkpoint in place where we require that employer to test the male and, ultimately, they will not approve that IVF unless that male has a semen analysis completed. That will kind of be the industry standard going forward to ultimately avoid a lot of that overutilization of spend and doing the right thing for the couple.
Q: Are you guys seeing people frustrated with doctors, not only from an access standpoint, but feeling looked over?
A: This is where I believe technology can be a huge innovator and disruptor to the current system, and that’s why you’ve seen a bunch of gravitation from employers and hospital systems and private practices to put in electronic medical records to make your physicians more efficient. Now you have dictation services with AI that can ultimately scribe notes so physicians can spend more time with patients. I think we’ve come a really long way in terms of the technology and innovation that the healthcare system is using.
However, on the flip side, there has been so much innovation in digital health and point solutions that we’ve seen these employers buying in the last five to ten years that, ultimately, it’s causing more confusion and more complexity and less continuity of care because there are so many different apps and so many different ways to go get that care that it’s not seamless for the end consumer.
So, what we’re seeing is a lot of consolidation from the self-insured employers in terms of healthcare navigation and how you use technology as the digital front door to ultimately navigate the patient or the member to the right care at the right time, and using technology and innovation and AI and chats and other uses of technology to ultimately create the best consumer experience that you can to keep that member engaged, to increase utilization, and keep the member in the system, but create such a great experience that that patient is going to continue using that system.
One example that I frequently use is One Medical. Concierge primary care has become very popular the last five to ten years. I use One Medical as kind of the gold standard for where Posterity Health should be in the next two to three years. All the care that I do has been delivered through an app, but it’s also been delivered in-person at the One Medical office here in Dallas.
What’s great about the technology is it’s so easy-to-use, it’s user-friendly. I haven’t talked to anybody on the phone in the four years I’ve been a patient with One Medical. So, there is ease of use to be able to direct message my provider, get my lab results back on an app, and pay my bill through online billing. It’s become so easy for me that I really enjoy the process, and I believe that that’s where most healthcare will get to.
But, at the end of the day, we have to have everything connected through the technology because, as soon as you get out of the One Medical ecosystem, now you’re dealing with the health system. So, how do you connect the technology and use continuity of care and data exchange to ultimately create this exceptional consumer experience across all these digital ecosystems?
Q: What have you seen as some of the root causes of infertility?
A: I would start with some of those socioeconomic patterns and trends that we’re seeing in the workforce in the last ten to fifteen years. Age has a huge impact on fertility. I think we’ve gone from a society as more of a traditional get out of school, get married, have kids, the mom stays at home, takes care of the kids, you’re having kids younger. I believe, and this is just a personal opinion, that we’ve seen more empowerment from women to get into the workforce and build a career and, as you’re doing that, I think kids start to become pushed off.
So, age is probably the number one thing I would mention in terms of why our fertility rates are increasing because people are waiting longer in their life to have kids and conceive a child and, every year I think after 30 or 32, your fertility chances continue to decrease. So I think age and kind of socioeconomic and just what’s happening in the world is impacting that.
Two, it’s overall health. So, some of the things that impact fertility can be obesity, maijuana use, and alcohol drinking—just being unhealthy in general. I think as we see specifically in America what’s happening, and I saw this in the chronic condition space, is the prevalence of chronic conditions continues to increase. So that means diabetes, heart attacks, cardiovascular issues, prediabetes. Unfortunately, as you continue to get unhealthier, your chances of your fertility continues to decrease.
So, we’ve seen an overall shift of the health and wellness of Americans, the age. There are other things, like a lot of it is education and awareness. So, most guys don’t know that saunas and hot tubs can impact fertility. Bike riding. So, if you’re a cyclist, that can impact fertility. So there are so many things I think more and more studies are starting to come out that ultimately are talking about this and reducing the stigma.
The biggest one I’ve actually seen on the male side is the direct-to-consumer telemedicine regulations that were lifted to controlled substances like testosterone. What’s been happening and what we’re finding out is that a lot of males that are probably my age between 25 and 35 are starting to take TRT or testosterone replacement therapy and, what people don’t know is that testosterone replacement therapy actually stops your sperm production.
So, I’ve talked to many physicians and many REIs at fertility centers that say 15 to 20 percent of the couples that are coming into the fertility center are not able to conceive a child because the male is on testosterone replacement therapy and has not told their female partner.
So, again, there’s a huge opportunity for education, and why Posterity Health was created to create the appropriate provider oversight and medication management for those men that might have a hormone deficiency. We are seeing in the data that there has been a significant increase in hormone deficiency in males between the ages of 18 and 39, but we need to provide the right care and appropriate care using provider oversight because there are medications like Clomid and HCG that can increase your testosterone without causing you to be infertile.
So, again, because all of this is happening, one, education and awareness, but two, really making sure that there’s more access to these at-home diagnostics. We’re really talking to these employers to be innovative to get those males and that couple going through 22 months of trying just to find out the guy has been taking testosterone and can’t get pregnant. So, really big development, and that’s a kind of direct-to-consumer advertising that we’ve seen in the space. I don’t think you can go a day without watching TV and not seeing a testosterone commercial or you walk into GNC and there’s testosterone. So, there’s just so much of it and we’re not talking about the impact that it can have on your overall health.
Q: Tell us a little bit about the collaboration with Mark Cuban and how it is helping.
A: One thing that we were looking at as we built Posterity is how do we provide more affordable medications for our patients. I happened to run into Mark and started talking to him about looking for a pharmacy vendor and kind of learn the business model of Cost Plus Drugs whose whole mission was to provide more affordable medications for their patients.
So we’ve ultimately collaborated and started to build a men’s health and male fertility component to the Cost Plus Drugs website and, what we ultimately found and started in our initial collaboration is the first fertility drug that they added on their formulary was Clomid. This is a really big development because what we find is a lot of times these males are going to testosterone replacement therapy and, unfortunately, it’s causing the overutilization of IVF—but what they don’t know and what the patients don’t know is that Clomid can actually be an alternative to testosterone replacement therapy and increase your testosterone and it also improves your fertility at the same time.
So, one thing that Mark and I have really started to find synergy on is that some self-insured employers—and I’ll use Mark’s words—waste a shitload of money on healthcare spend. So, as Mark looks to disrupt the PBM or the pharmacy benefit manager world, and we look to disrupt the overutilization of IVF in the self-insured employer space, we saw a huge opportunity to provide more education and awareness and reduce the stigma and make sure that patients are educated to be taking the appropriate medications at affordable costs to ultimately not impact your fertility status.
So, we’ve been able to collaborate on talking to our patients about Clomid, talking to our self-insured employers about the right medications using medication management and provider oversight to ensure that their patients are getting the right treatment.
Q: What are your hopes for the next few years when you think about your career, Posterity Health’s growth, and the “state of the state” of infertility in general?
A: This has been one interesting career aspiration and development that I’ve been afforded the opportunity to do and, really, it comes down to being able to work more closely with our physicians. So, one of the great things that Posterity has been able to do is hire the best physicians in the country. We have eight full-time employed reproductive endocrinologists, we’ve built a hybrid care delivery model, we’re leveraging telehealth to get members in faster, providing more convenience, providing more affordability.
But what we’ve seen the last ten years is there’s been a huge influx of venture capital money coming into the market to help fund the innovation of these companies. So, one thing that I’ve had a personal adjustment from is, you know, at my previous companies, 70 percent of the capital was invested in your sales, your marketing, and your product—whereas Posterity Health has taken the angle that 70 percent of our capital has been invested in building out the best physicians and clinical care team in the country, which is ultimately what is going to win Posterity deals and provide the best care in the future. So, we’ve really spent the first two to three years of the company building out our center of excellence, building out our clinical protocols, building out our workflows to be able to provide the best care for our patients.
As we grow and continue to look at scale and innovation and technology, as we start to see more venture money, what we’re going to do is use that money to really invest in the consumer technology and sales machine so we can go. It will be interesting to see bringing together the best doctors, building out a new clinical model that’s never been done before using APPs and NPs to ultimately provide leverage for our physicians to provide and just complete their surgeries while we wrap a male care team around our patients to do follow-up visits and initial evaluations.
So, it’s been great seeing our clinical team be able to scale and hire the best people, but really excited to be able to ramp up our technology and innovation and our marketing and sales teams to really go out and get male fertility into every self-insured employer in the next three to five years.
I actually think the golden ticket to Posterity Health’s success is marketing to the female consumer because most males don’t use the healthcare system. They’re not very good at going to the doctor, but we know women are much better. So if we are promoting and marketing and talking to the female and, really, the couple about the benefit of including the male earlier in the fertility journey, I think we’re going to have a much vaster path to impact because the female partner is going to say hey, you need to go get tested because I’m not going to go through 22 months of trying until we know that it’s a couple’s issue.
So, we see that as the future and there’s a huge opportunity to market, provide awareness, provide education to ultimately spread the word about the impact of infertility in general. But why it’s so important to promote the simultaneous evaluation of a couple and include the male earlier in the fertility journey is to ultimately find the least-invasive, most cost-effective path to parenthood.
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This blog post was written based on kozēkozē Podcast Episode 369: Men’s Fertility with Matt Lenz of Posterity Health.
If you’d like to listen to the conversation first-hand, tune in here.
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