Celebrating Women: An Interview with TriadHLTH CEO & Founder, Cheryl Morrison Deutsch

March is Women’s History Month, and at TriadHLTH, we’re all about celebrating, uplifting, and empowering women! This month, we’re featuring stories from women we admire, starting with this excerpt from an interview with our CEO and Founder, Cheryl Morrison Deutsch. 

Hi Cheryl! We know you, but could you introduce yourself and share a bit about your background?

Hi! I’m Cheryl Morrison Deutsch, the CEO and Founder of TriadHLTH. For most of my career, I have been at the intersection of healthcare and technology. I have focused on supporting individuals with chronic conditions, primarily through the utilization of digital healthcare programs coupled with live coaches. These programs help them make lifestyle changes and educate themselves to be the best advocates they can be so that they can get the care they need and deserve. 

What inspired you to start TriadHLTH?

For many years, I have heard stories of women seeking medical care and being turned away, dismissed, or not listened to. I’ve experienced it myself. It’s frustrating, and it causes anxiety, and it may even cause someone to not seek care when they really need to get care. That’s part of why I started TriadHLTH. 

Couple that with my understanding of what was happening in the medical industry and what new opportunities exist for people to improve their health, especially in the development and expansion of GLP-1 medications. There’s been a surge with GLP-1s recently. More research is being done, and I began to hear about the opportunities these medications create for women to manage a variety of chronic conditions, not just obesity. They work, and they work really well. I’d hear people saying they finally realized there’s nothing wrong with me, and this medication is giving me a chance to manage this condition I’ve struggled with for my entire life. 

But then, I also looked at the burden it’s placed on many doctors who are now being asked to prescribe these medications but may not have the time or knowledge to support these women and ensure the best medication experience possible. It’s about helping women navigate all phases of the medication experience; they need additional support to create a new strategy for the way that they are going to approach their health

There was a void, and that's where TriadHLTH came in. We can help fill that void. I know that people may come back and say, well, there's a void for men, too, and there is. But right now, the majority of people who are on GLP-1 medications are women. And as I mentioned, women are often not heard or seen in the medical community. There’s a historical lack of clinical research done involving women, which means there’s less guidance available on how best to support women. That's why TriadHLTH was formed: to contribute to the women’s healthcare space and help make a difference right now, specifically for women facing chronic conditions and utilizing these medications to treat them. 

Tell us a little bit more about TriadHTLH’s first program, HLTHYher. 

HLTHYher is a digital whole health experience with live health coaching designed to support women taking GLP-1 medications. We think of whole health as mental, physical, and social health, and that last piece is very important: community support. Our members join a community of women they can share with and learn from, and that connection is crucial for real change to occur. HLTHYher is specifically for women facing chronic conditions, and those chronic conditions can vary. We've talked about obesity already, but this could also include prediabetes, diabetes, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), inflammatory autoimmune conditions, and more, like perimenopause and menopause. We aim to provide a personalized strategy for women taking these medications to manage their conditions. 

What do you see as the current state of the women’s health technology market, and where do you see it heading in the next few years? 

Right now, I think that HLTHYher is sitting at a very unique juncture. There's nobody else addressing these issues the same way that we're addressing them. When you look at our competition, there are plenty of companies right now that are going after the GLP-1 market. But they're not specifically for women, and they are mostly focused on prescribing these medications, not necessarily working with people once they are taking them. Those programs are focused on keeping people engaged for the sake of additional prescriptions, and that's where they make their money. They may have a program alongside the prescription, but those programs were not created specifically for women on GLP-1s. They were created for diets and weight loss, and they happen to just be offered along with a GLP-1. 

On the other hand, we have businesses that might be considered our competitors: women's health programs. Many of them focus heavily on fertility, and some focus on menopause. Some focus on overall women’s health and general wellness. But they’re not focused on GLP-1s and managing chronic conditions specifically for women. The only program I have seen doing that is HLTHYher.

In the future, I think that many companies will continue to work down that path, and I don’t know if there will ever truly be that overlap from anybody else. I think that so many of these health programs still focus on treatment for anybody and just create a kind of generic program. I also see many of these health programs heading more toward AI, specifically using it as a chatbot to replace a health coach. At HLTHYher, we use AI, but it’s to support the member and coach, giving them insights to review and discuss. AI isn’t caring for the member. A lot of other programs use the chatbot for the sake of efficiency, but people can see right through that. A chatbot doesn’t give you the same thought, the same answers, the same level of conversation that a human can. You don’t create the same relationship with a chatbot that you can create with a coach, or another woman, or a community. You cannot take the human out of digital healthcare, but you can use AI to provide different and unique insights. 

Can you give an example of some of those kinds of insights? 

Absolutely. We collect a lot of data; some is passive, through a digital scale or a sleep device. Some is logged by the member adding to their journal or recording their medication and side effects. All that data can be combined and reviewed by AI to identify trends and patterns in behavior. Maybe it’s something like a connection between nausea after injection and eating habits the day before injection. We can look at data for a specific individual but also trends we see across the population, and share that information with the coach and the member, so they can have a conversation and create a new strategy. 

Since it’s Women’s History Month, can you share any women you admire or are inspired by?

There’s someone who’s maybe a little rough around the edges, but her story found me at the right time, and that’s Diana Nyad. I watched that movie, which is a drama but based on a true story, and I was so inspired. Here’s someone real who wanted to make sure that the last chapter of her life was in her control. She wasn’t going to let someone else write her story or say what she could or couldn’t do. She decided that she would swim from Cuba to the Florida Keys, and eventually, she did it. She knew she needed the right team around her, a team that would bring other points of view to the table. And for whatever reason, at that moment in my life, in my career, when I watched that movie, I thought, she is absolutely right. 

I do believe that you need to write your own story, and you need to tell your own tale, and you need to surround yourself with great people. That's what I've set out to do with TriadHLTH: surround myself with great people who don't always think alike but are willing to work together, to collaborate, and to create what I hope is going to be really groundbreaking care for women.