Season 3 Episode 5 (24): ViVE Health Equity Series - WellnessWits and Sanarai
Welcome to the latest episode of the Treat Us Right Podcast. We are excited to feature two amazing emerging companies addressing health equity head-on to make healthcare work for us: WellnessWits and Sanarai.
Episode Summary
In this episode of the Treat Us Right podcast, host David Williams interviews Dr. Kike Oduba, founder and CEO of Wellness Wits, and Luis Suarez and Laura Garcia, PhD of Sanarai. Dr. Oduba discusses how Wellness Wits is a digital health platform for shared medical appointments, which allows doctors to see multiple patients with similar diagnoses in one appointment, providing more time for each patient and creating a supportive community. She also emphasizes the importance of addressing medical misinformation and disinformation by involving doctors in the social narrative of patients with chronic diseases. Luis and Laura discuss how Sanarai aims to address the mental health needs of the Latino community by providing culturally sensitive mental health services in Spanish. They highlight the challenges of building a business and clinical practice in this space, but also the importance of focusing on prevention and emotional support to prevent the development of mental health disorders. Listeners can learn more about Wellness Wits at www.wellnesswits.com and contact Sanarai through their website www.sanarai.com or LinkedIn profiles.
Transcript
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Host: David S. Williams III (00:21):
Welcome everyone to the Treat Us Right podcast. I'm David Williams, CEO of Care3, and your host. This episode we have two more features from the ViVE Conference in Los Angeles, two companies that are impacting health equity to make healthcare work for us. First up is Dr. Kike UBA and her company Wellness Wits. Dr. Uba, welcome to the Treat Us Right podcast.
Kike Oduba, MD (00:56):
Thank you David. Glad to be here.
Host: David S. Williams III (00:59):
Great. So tell the Treatise writers, which is what I call them, people who want to make right things happen in the world. Tell everyone who you are and about your company Wellness Wits.
Kike Oduba, MD (01:15):
Sure. I am Dr. Kiki Uba, founder and CEO of Wellness with I'm a physician entrepreneur and I'm also a mom of three, have navigated the healthcare system through my own personal health challenges for my family and friends, and so I am passionate about health equity, closing gaps in care. I'm also passionate about helping people with chronic diseases not to have to suffer too long in silence or in silo, and so I have a huge passion for building communities around chronic diseases so we can support each other and also have resources shared amongst us and also help people get equitable access to the care they deserve.
Host: David S. Williams III (02:05):
That's great. So how did you come up with the concept for Wellness Wits and in your mind, how does the company promote health equity specifically?
Kike Oduba, MD (02:15):
That's a great question. To start with, wellness with is a digital health platform for shared medical appointments. For those who don't know what shared medical appointments are, it is a care delivery model where a doctor groups their patients based on diagnosis and begins to offer care to them as a group rather than individual appointment. What makes this very interesting is the fact that rather than seeing three people in one hour time slot individually, this gives the doctor the opportunity to see multiple people up to 10 or 15 in the same appointment. That means the patients get up to an hour talking to the doctor and also other who have similar lived experiences. This way the doctor is able to observe and understand the social determinants of health factors that they're not able to address in a short 10 to 15 minute appointment. That way wellness rates is able to deliver care in such a way that is equitable, is fast and also efficient not only for the doctors and the caregivers, but also for the patients to be able to get quick and easy access to health information, medication management, health coaching, and also nutrition and fitness education as well.
Host: David S. Williams III (03:40):
Wow, you said a lot right there. Can I ask you a follow-up question though? Is it interesting or do you see in your experience that the peer-based group also ends up how helping each other through the sessions?
Kike Oduba, MD (03:56):
Absolutely. Imagine going to your doctor's office and you have a constraint of time. Say you have only 10 minutes to be in front of your doctor if you had a laundry list of questions says you have five questions, most likely your doctor gets through two of them. But when you have a group of other people who have the same clinic condition as you and you had a whole hour to be in front of your doctor and in front of those people, what happens is the questions that you're not able to ask or you don't even remember to ask or you don't even know you should ask somebody else in the group has that question and your doctor is able to address those concerns. The other good thing is that as people are talking about how they're self-managing their chronic condition or how they're there into care plan, you are also learning vicariously from them how to manage your own condition. That way you don't feel like you're navigating your healthcare alone, and then also you're able to get more empowerment from other people who have similar problems as you do.
Host: David S. Williams III (05:02):
That's amazing. I, as a founding executive of patients like me, am a huge advocate on peer-based care where people can learn from each other tricks to the trade to live a better daily life. What you're doing is even taking that to the next level where you're allowing for clinical information, expert medical interventions to occur through this peer process, which in theory, and you can tell me if this is true, can reduce the impact of miss or disinformation that can sometimes be shared in peer-based patient networks.
Kike Oduba, MD (05:43):
Absolutely, absolutely. I guess it would be great for me to give you a background of how this came about. It was all about medical misinformation and disinformation. Actually from my own personal experience from a chronic illness, I joined Facebook groups just to see what's out there, what are people experiencing. However, we know Facebook is not secure. There's no HIPAA privacy or confidentiality protection there, and so I had a lot of people sharing all kinds of information that some were beneficial, but many were quite harmful because you're throwing a lot of information there that is not potentially relevant or personalized to the people who are consuming this information. And so I thought to myself, what can we do to include doctors in the social narrative that people who have chronic diseases encounter outside the clinical setting? And so I thought groups, but then what is an incentive for doctors to want to engage with patients in groups? How do they get reimbursed or compensated for their time? And so one way or the other, I discovered what shared medical visits were and that was the answer to that question. So in my experience, what I've found is that medical misinformation and disinformation is prevalent simply because patients tend to believe people who are like them, but then, which is not wrong actually, but then it has to come from doctors as the source of truth to validate and to control to some extent the narrative that patients encounter on social platforms and on the internet.
Host: David S. Williams III (07:32):
I love that and in my experience with patients like me where we would have people sharing their experiences, we use the power of data as the validator at the peer level. So people were sharing their information, not just in a forum like a Facebook group, but they were actually taking clinically relevant rating scales over time to show what the progression of their disease was and taking that information to their doctors and sharing that information in their peer group. Where I like wellness wit is that's making it all come together and then you're getting an actual clinical intervention. You're having that discussion and like you talked about, you have more time with the doctor, you have more time with other people who are like you, and so you now get the richness of learning from all of them, but with a clear medical expert right there for you to validate and to bring all of this information together for each patient. I love it. It's so great.
Kike Oduba, MD (08:37):
Yeah, absolutely. I have seen so many patients stories of how group visits totally helped improve their trust and engagement with their care providers and also just giving them that soce knowing that I'm not alone in this journey. There's other people like me going through the same experience, and if they're getting better and they're doing well under my doctor's care, most likely I will do better and do well as well. Think about people who have cancer, right? When you have cancer, you are scared, you feel alone, and also you are concerned, would you ever get better? Would you have to go through surgery with the cancer research? Or maybe you have mental health issues, you don't know why you're trapped in a certain state of mind and you look normal, but you're really not normal. All of those experiences, when you put five people with that same story in the same room, it's beautiful to just see how they open up, how they relax, and how they feel so validated that I'm not alone. Because one of the biggest problems you find in a chronic disease or even people who are going through end of life care is isolation. Even though there's many people around them, they have so many caregivers, they still feel sort of alone. And so the power of community and the power of peer support cannot be underestimated simply because of these reasons for people who are going through a long journey in their healthcare.
Host: David S. Williams III (10:17):
That's great and it all sounds fantastic, but then I have to ask the question, what challenges are you facing and how do you plan to overcome them when you're building Wellness Wits?
Kike Oduba, MD (10:29):
That's a good question because this is not a very popular care delivery model. The biggest challenge is winning over the care providers to know that this is something patients actually want. This is something patients love. Case in point, go to Facebook, just search how many diabetic groups are on there? There's over 20, right? There's a group, one of the groups that I joined, the hypothyroid mom group, there was 1.2 million people there. So just showing that evidence to the doctors saying, your patients want community, why not offer it to them? And the question is, well, what is the benefit to me? What is the incentive? And then we pull up policies from payers that says, Hey, doc, you can actually build the same exact thing you've been billing for. one-on-ones, you can build that for groups as well. Then their eyes go brighten up and they're like, sign me up.
(11:24)
And so gradually we've been breaking down those barriers. The other challenge is just the culture of healthcare generally. It's hard to change things at the system level. And so we've had to do a lot of advocacy training and education of healthcare providers to understand how to deliver group visits. The other challenge is the technology which we have successfully solved and fixed the technology of how to get people in a group visit for those who want to be anonymous, and those people who want to be quiet and just observe rather. And so we've been able to build a technology for group AI that allows people to show up as avatars. And also we're working on technology to help people mask their voice, such that if you want to sound like a chipmunk in a group visit so that nobody knows it's, you can turn that on.
(12:19)
The other thing is the language barrier. How can we make this even more culturally diverse? We've literally just engaged and almost in the process of closing a partnership agreement with a language translation service that allows over 300 languages on our platform. And so whatever language you're speaking, most likely you'll be able to get a service on our platform such that if there's a doctor speaking English and you speak, say French, Spanish, Haitian, Creole, or maybe you speak Portuguese, there's going to be an interpreter on the call that synchronously is speaking. As you are listening to the doctor, you are hearing your own local language. So we've had those challenges and one by one we've been able to solve them through technology and partnerships.
Host: David S. Williams III (13:11):
You are really appealing to the consumer need here so that the patients can get care that is health equity incarnate right there. I really congratulate you on all of these initiatives that you're doing. How can people then learn more about Wellness Wits and how can they contact you?
Kike Oduba, MD (13:30):
Absolutely. So to learn more about Wellness Wits, go to ww dot wellness wits.com and if you're a patient, go to consumers or patients, there's a tab there. If you're a healthcare provider or payer, go to the payer tab. And if you're an employer and you'd like to sign up your employees for maybe weight loss, diabetes education and management or nutrition, click on the employer tab and you can connect with us there. We have subscription forms where you can download our white papers and educational materials to give you more information, and we also have our email addresses and phone numbers on our website for you to contact and connect with us.
Host: David S. Williams III (14:21):
That's wonderful. Wonderful. Kike, thank you so much. I should call you Dr. Odba. Thank you so much for joining us here on the Treat This Right podcast. And yes, I would love you to come back and update us in the future on Wellness Wits and for all you writers out there, definitely check out Wellness Wits. We will have all of the links and information that Dr. Oba told us on our website or on the podcast screen. So again, thank you so much.
Kike Oduba, MD (14:55):
Thanks so much, David. It was a huge pleasure having this chat with you,
Host: David S. Williams III (15:00):
But in the words of Kirk Franklin, it ain't over. Next up on the Treatise Ride podcast is Luis Suarez and La de Garcia of rai. They bring mental health services to people who speak native Spanish because that's a big, big hole in the US healthcare market. And Luis and Lara, welcome to the Treat Us right podcast.
Luis Suarez (15:32):
Thanks for having us, David. So I'm Luis Juarez, founder and CEO at Sanarai. At Sanarai, we exist because there is a massive gap to cover the Latino communities needs in terms of mental health. Only 5% of mental health professionals in the US speak Spanish versus 13% of the population that speak Spanish at home. Treatment rates for this community are way below the average and in the context of a mental health crisis with booming the demand for services and a shortage of mental health professionals. The problem is exacerbated for this community. And the numbers I mentioned, just make it three times as hard to get behavioral healthcare in Spanish. So this is a problem I experienced myself. I'm originally from Mexico City, came to the US to do my MBA, then worked in management consulting for three years after I graduated. And in 2020 I was looking for mental health support and I was struggling to find someone that I could speak Spanish with that I could fit in my schedule.
(16:38)
So that's when I realized about this issue and decided to start Sanarai initially by connecting folks that speak Spanish in the US to mental health professionals in Latin America to provide culturally sensitive Spanish language emotional support at accessible prices. And that's still the core of what we do today. So services in Spanish not only are super hard to get, but also if you can do behavioral health services in your native language is going to be beneficial. And then there's a part about the cultural relevance that provides that baseline of understanding when you start with your provider and those initial matches are going to be the best predictors of a better outcomes, and B, that folks stick around for services longer.
Laura Garcia, PhD (17:26):
Thank you, Luis. Hi everyone. I'm Laura Garcia. I am a doctor in clinical psychology. I am a psychology advisor for Sanarai. I'm also originally from Columbia and came to the States to get my PhD and become a therapist because I thought that that's one way in which I could help the Latino community. While getting my training, I realized some of the challenges that Latinos experience when trying to seek mental health treatment. Some of those challenges obviously are systemic. There's lack of Spanish speaker providers, but there's other social challenges like the mental health stigma or the fact that our treatments aren't necessarily emphasizing their values. A lot of our evidence-based treatments are based on the Anglo-Saxon or Western idea of mental health, and sometimes it doesn't take into account the experiences of these communities. So I left a career in clinical psych and decided to work in tech because I knew that it could increase the access to mental health treatments. So I've done that for five years now, and I've joined Sanarai to figure out how do we make it so that we can use technology to increase access to services to Hispanics in the States, but also get rid of some of those barriers, some of the mental health stigmas, some of the lack of awareness about treatments, and even just helping people see that there's a company from Latinos that can actually relate to their experiences and is looking towards helping them.
Host: David S. Williams III (19:04):
Thank you for basically preempting all of my questions. It's amazing what you've already done at rri. I think that you've identified not only things from personal experience and professional experience, something that I think goes completely overlooked in the United States, which is essentially cultural sensitivity and mental health overall. Luis, do you want us to talk about some of the challenges you have in building the business and how are you overcoming those?
Luis Suarez (19:31):
Yes, totally. One challenge can be go to market specifically with built a good direct to consumer business so far and given wage arbitrage with folks that are based in Latin America, we can make a solution that is culturally relevant in Spanish, but also accessible prices. So a lot of our client base are going to be, well, one of two cases of folks that are uninsured and underinsured and are looking for an alternative to get some sort of mental health services. And then we have folks that have coverage through work or something, but they want more culturally relevant care and services in their language. So yeah, we're thinking about and similar to other companies that start direct to consumer and to get customer validation, a lot of feedback and iterate on the product and then shift to more like a B2B approach. So we're in the middle of that transition. So imagining ways that we can fit into the existing healthcare infrastructure where we know there's a need, there's folks looking for these type of services can be at least two weeks of a wait list. And so yeah, just trying to work around that, that complexity of that has been challenging. But for example, now we're working with California Healthcare Foundation, they invested in Sanarai, so that's been huge for us to be able to explore specifically the Medicaid channel in California.
Host: David S. Williams III (21:21):
Oh, that's great. And CHCF is really taking the lead on investing in companies that are focused on health equity. What are some of the challenges in building a clinical practice this way? When you're dealing with the fact that you have to have a certain level of quality, you have to have a certain consistency under the brand in the company. Can you talk about those initiatives, some of the challenges and how you are overcoming those?
Laura Garcia, PhD (21:49):
Yeah, I think one of the biggest questions that we had was in the spectrum of care, where do we fit? So we have these idea of treatments that are evidence-based and are provided by professionals, licensed clinicians, but there's also a whole deal of the spectrum that's preventative. So I think part of our work has been on identifying where do we fit, and I think we do fit with these preventative space that we are not necessarily providing treatment to people who are diagnosed with mental health disorders, but when we do provide services, we provide more of these emotional support, the support that they need that's basically culturally sensitive to their needs. And that support can in fact, and it is our hope, can in fact prevent the development of mental health disease. It is a challenge, but I think from my perspective, it is better for these communities to focus on the prevention rather than the treatment.
(22:47)
Because once you cross that threshold to people not being able to function because of mental health, then you have all these barriers of stigma, of judgments from their community that they want to avoid and that prevents them from seeking treatment. So if we target people at a prevention place where they don't feel like they're going to the doctor to get fixed, but rather that rather they're working on themselves, making sure they have the coping skills to leave their day-to-day, they're more likely to seek services at that point. It is our sense. So I think as answering that question then led us to develop the curriculums and training so that our providers know that they're there to support their day-to-day of individuals. And in fact, people are very receptive. I feel like it was very surprising to see how many of our clients just enjoy being able to talk to someone, especially if they're in the states because there's obviously a lot of isolation, there's an epidemic of isolation and it's hitting these communities a lot harder. So even just having there to vent and to talk about their daily lives has been helpful for some.
Host: David S. Williams III (24:02):
That is fantastic. I have to ask you now, how can people learn more about ri? How can they contact you? Because from what you've just explained, you're going to get inbound from Treat us right listeners
Luis Suarez (24:17):
So people can find us. atsi.com, our website, there's mostly, it's going to be in Spanish for clients interested and on social media. I think LinkedIn could be a good one, just Luis Juarez at ra. It's probably going to work.
Host: David S. Williams III (24:38):
That's great.
Laura Garcia, PhD (24:39):
And yeah, they can contact me through LinkedIn as well, Laura Garcia, PhD and also through Sanarai.
Host: David S. Williams III (24:49):
Perfect. And I will have all of these emails and links on our site as well for this episode. Thank you Luis and Lara for taking time and talking to us at the Treat Us Right podcast. Love what you're doing.
Laura Garcia, PhD and Luis Suarez (25:04):
Thank you. Thank you.
Host: David S. Williams III (25:05):
All right. And that'll do it for this episode of the Treat Us Right podcast. Stay tuned to our next episode as we continue our series on the Vibe Conference out of Los Angeles. And we appreciate your listen. Give us that five star rating and we'll see you in the next episode. Take care.