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Women’s health-tech firms have generated buzz by innovating services for pregnancy and fertility earlier in a woman’s life. But a Midtown-based telemedicine company is garnering attention by focusing on an oft-overlooked part later in the health cycle: menopause.
Elektra Health, founded in 2019, offers clinical and patient education services for women who are no longer in the reproductive window. It aims to provide specialized menopause care through personalized health and wellness plans; advice for managing symptoms, such as sleep loss and hot flashes; and prescriptions for hormone-replacement therapy.
Such care is not all that common in the U.S. More than 1 million women go into menopause each year, according to the National Institutes of Health, yet there are still knowledge gaps and a lack of physicians who receive adequate menopause-specific training, said Jannine Versi, CEO of Elektra Health.
Versi, an entrepreneur who comes from a family of doctors, and her co-founder, Alessandra Henderson, came up with the idea for Elektra out of a desire to help women better understand their hormones. When Henderson went through the process of freezing her eggs, the hormones she had to take briefly impaired her vision, which inspired her to learn how these chemical messengers affect the body. Her research ultimately showed her that many women have a poor understanding of their hormones, especially those entering menopause, and the medical system isn’t set up to fully educate them.
When Elektra launched, investments in women’s health firms were taking off. But a lot of this investment focused on pregnancy and fertility.
“Women’s health gets lumped into this one category,” Versi told Crain’s. “It means so many things.”
There’s been an uptick in investor attention around women’s midlife care. Elektra Health raised $3.3 million in February in a seed round led by UPMC Enterprises, the venture arm of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, as well as Flare Capital Partners and Seven Seven Six. The investment brought the company’s total fundraising to $7.6 million.
The company also works with large employers. Elektra Health partnered with Financial District-based insurer EmblemHealth in 2022 to offer the menopause care platform to Emblem’s 4,000 employees, and since then the insurer has offered it to its plan enrollees. Boston-based insurer Mass General Brigham Health also offers Elektra’s menopause care platform to patients enrolled in its plans.
Dr. Anna Barbieri, an ob-gyn and founding physician at Elektra Health, said the company’s clinical services and patient education offerings also serve women seeking to make lifestyle changes. The company’s clinical memberships, which include telemedicine appointments with ob-gyns and access to hormone therapies, are available to patients in New York, Connecticut and Florida, and cost $30 per month or $250 per year in addition to the costs of medical care. Elektra offers telemedicine appointments with its six-person clinical team as well as referrals to in-person appointments with women’s health specialists.
It also offers a membership just for education that consists of webinars and menopause counseling. People who subscribe to Elektra’s education membership can speak to a menopause doula, a nonclinical professional who explains what to expect during that time of life.
Barbieri said education doesn’t really happen in traditional clinical settings. Ob-gyns usually get a 15-minute block to see a patient, a time slot that doesn’t allow for in-depth counseling around menopause symptoms and lifestyle changes, Barbieri said.
Barbieri said Elektra is aiming to fill some of these gaps through its telemedicine offerings. “We are not at a point where virtual care can substitute for everything,” Barbieri said. “We can certainly serve as a bridge.”
Elektra is planning to expand its virtual footprint into Massachusetts and Pennsylvania in the coming months, and Versi said that the recent funding round will support its efforts to grow its number of in-person clinics.
Although Elektra launched in a period of growing investments in women’s health tech, Versi says funding for the sector is “barely scratching the surface” of what’s needed to fill gaps in services.
“I really think it’s just the beginning,” she said.
April 4, 2024: A previous version of this story misspelled Alessandra Henderson’s name. The story has been corrected.
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Amanda D'Ambrosio , 2024-04-09 11:33:04
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