Welcome to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence.

In today’s episode, our host Sara Payne is joined by Andrew Lacy, CEO of Prenuvo, recorded live on the floor of HLTH 2025. Together, they dive into the evolving landscape of preventive healthcare, examining the bold moves required to shift from reactive late-stage disease management to proactive early detection and holistic diagnostics.

Andrew brings his experience as an innovator in healthcare, spearheading Prenuvo’s mission to redefine the annual physical through advanced whole-body imaging and blood biomarkers. Their approach opens the door to detecting life-threatening diseases earlier and helping individuals understand the real impact their lifestyle has on long-term health outcomes.

The conversation explores why the traditional health system is lagging in diagnostics, the uncomfortable truths that must be confronted for meaningful change, and how both messaging and clinic experience play a critical role in overcoming patients' fear and nurturing gratitude after preventive screening. Sara and Andrew also touch on the systemic and economic challenges of proving ROI for preventive innovations, especially with employers and payers, and how data-driven evidence and strategic partnerships can unlock wider adoption.

Thank you for being part of the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. The future of healthcare depends on it.

Key Takeaways:

1. A New Model for the Annual Physical: Andrew Lacy describes Prenuvo as the “annual physical of the future,” integrating whole-body imaging and blood biomarkers to proactively identify disease. By offering a more comprehensive view than traditional checkups, Prenuvo aims to close the gaps left by current approaches which often produce false negatives and leave individuals in the dark about their health status.
2. Uncomfortable Truths Behind Early Detection: The episode highlights a critical mindset shift required in healthcare: current cancer screenings cover only about 14% of diagnosed cancers, leaving vast blind spots across organs like the liver, kidneys, and brain—areas rarely screened. Andrew emphasizes that true reform lies in challenging incremental fixes and pushing for large-scale preventive health solutions, even as system inertia resists radical change.
3. Mindset, Messaging & Patient Experience: Fear and anxiety are common reactions to the idea of deep health screening, not just for patients but also physicians. Andrew discusses how Prenuvo addresses this by offering warm, inviting clinic environments and reframing preventive health as a form of empowerment rather than dread. Breaking down these psychological barriers through thoughtful marketing and messaging is essential for shifting public and professional attitudes.
4. Driving Adoption Through Education & Evidence: Change doesn’t happen overnight. Prenuvo’s strategy involves educating physicians—often skeptics themselves—by turning them into advocates after experiencing screenings personally or through their patients. The company is investing in prospective clinical trials to gather the long-term data necessary for convincing payers, employers, and insurance providers to support and cover preventive diagnostics.
5. Navigating Economic Challenges for Preventive Health: One of the episode’s key marketing challenges is proving the ROI for preventive interventions in a system where patients often change jobs (and insurance plans). Andrew shares how partnering with blue-collar employers, who see long-term employee loyalty and higher occupational risks, provides an ideal proving ground for demonstrating impact. This targeted approach lays the groundwork for broader adoption, beginning with high-risk populations and expanding coverage incrementally as evidence builds.

**DISCOUNT CODE: Prenuvo is generously offering our listeners $300 off a full-body MRI scan. To redeem, visit prenuvo.com/THMC.

Learn more about Prenuvo at prenuvo.com.

Welcome back to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. I'm your host, Sara Payne, and I'm coming to you from HLTH 2025. We're spotlighting some of the bold voices that are shaping the future of healthcare.

The Health Marketing Collective is powered by Inprela, a communications firm built for health brands determined to lead, not follow. We partner with marketing innovators who aren't just chasing attention, they're building movements. Connect with the audiences shaping the future of care and lead the conversations that move your market. Ready to rise above the noise? Visit inprela.com that's inprela.com let's create something that moves the market.

Joining me is Andrew Lacy, CEO of Prenuivo.

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Yeah, thanks so much for joining me. Why don't we start with a brief introduction for people who may not know yet what Prenuvo is. Tell me what it's all about and what is the problem that you're solving in healthcare.

So in some ways, Prenuvo is an annual physical of the future. The problem we're trying to solve for is that a health system doesn't really tell us a lot about our health. In fact, we go in for a physical or go in for a checkup and a lot of time we're not really told what's going on inside our bodies. This sort of the health system is this one big false negative factory.

Yeah.

So at Prenuva, what we do is we have this advanced physical with a foundation in imaging, but also including blood biomarkers to be able to diagnose life threatening disease early and help you understand how the way you're living your life is impacting sort of your underlying health.

I love that. I love that Prenuvo isn't just imaging. It really is about a new mindset around prevention. What is the quiet part about how we're currently approaching diagnostics and early disease detection that really needs to be said out loud in order for change to happen?

Well, what's interesting about what we do is it's very cutting edge. We started six or seven years ago and in fact, when we went out and talked to physicians, most of them had never heard about whole body imaging. And one by one, we expose them to what we're doing either as patients or through their patients. They started to see the promise of this imaging and in uncovering and diagnosing disease that you might be asymptomatic of, that they are over time sort of referring us more and more Patients. So really there's no way to speed up and accelerate a health system adopting a new preventive health measurement, preventive health intervention, other than through just educating folks. And that's what we've been doing for the last six or seven years.

Yeah, I love that. I love the work you're doing there. You've talked about this massive opportunity and potential that we have to redirect the billions and even trillions of dollars that we're spending on end stage, late stage disease treatment really to the front end. Right. Redirect that early disease detection and prevention. But that's going to take. It's a massive mindset shift, a massive systems shift. So what are the uncomfortable truths that we need to embrace in order to make that even possible?

Well, just to recap on this in the context of cancer, so we have a few cancer screening exams for colon cancer, for breast cancer, we have PSA tests for prostate cancer for men. But those screening approaches only capture about 14% of all of the cancers that are ultimately diagnosed. So we have these big blind spots in a healthcare system. It's only through really challenging the status quo and saying, well, is that all that we can expire to as a health system? Are there other ways that we can approach early diagnosis and disease management, catching things before they become chronic? And these are not incremental solutions, unfortunately. And our healthcare system is very good at incremental solutions. It's very good at finding a new cancer drug that helps someone live another few months with cancer. But it takes an awful long time to change the health system when it comes to preventive health. Most of the tests that we have today were hard fought battles over 20, 30 and 40 years.

What we hope the health system can do today is to take a step back and say, well, are we happy with what we have? And is there a fundamentally different way of approaching healthcare that's rooted in proactive health?

Great point. And you brought up, you know, breast, colon, prostate. There are other areas of the body where we aren't getting those annual screenings necessarily, like the liver, the kidneys, the brain. Right. Like this is a huge opportunity to be looking at the body more holistically.

Well, even we're starting to see cancer in a lot of younger people. So even in those areas where we do have these screening tests, they're not necessarily available for people at the time they're getting diagnosed with these cancers. Very good. So I think the paradigm needs to shift. I think there are more people that are having a dialogue about this and what health system we want to have today than ever before in the history of medicine. That's exciting. And you come to a conference like health, you see so many companies with different interventions out there. I'm not necessarily sure what's going to, you know, what will succeed and what will fail, what's clinically validated, what isn't.

But the sort of conversations that we're having today, we wouldn't have been having 10 or 20 years ago.

Yeah, great progress, for sure. Great time for technologies like yours. I've heard you say that you've spent quite a bit of time in the clinics with patients that are getting scanned and that the universal emotion that they express at the end, whether or not they're getting a cancer diagnosis or a clean bill of health, is one of gratitude. And yet I know from personal experience, family, friends, et cetera, that thinking about going into something like this brings a lot of fear and anxiety. So how do you and your team think about messaging and this awareness? Right. And what stories and messaging do you use to help them bridge from that place of anxiety and fear to one of gratitude?

It's a great question. It's the thing I spend the most time thinking about, and I'm not sure I have all the answers, but I think in asking questions and engaging on this with consumers, we have the possibility of changing their minds. What I like to tell people is if you are nervous and afraid about learning about your health, that's not a you problem, that's a health system problem.

Oh, great point.

We've been conditioned because we only ever hear about these horrible stories of late detection of someone who just dropped dead out of the blue, someone who went for a checkup and came back with a terminal cancer diagnosis. All these stories are so horrible, frankly. Why would we wish that on ourselves? Why? We want to go looking for answers about our own health. So we're being conditioned. Great plan to think a certain way. That's actually sort of destructive of our own longevity. And it's helping people sort of, sort of like face that reality and question a little bit, well, why do I feel this way? Why do I want to put proactive healthcare off? What does that say about how I'd be conditioned and how can I break out of that conditioning? But it's the biggest challenge in preventive health. The worst thing about preventive health is always brought for another day, right? And.

But all of us, if we're, if we're ever unfortunate enough to diagnose with late stage disease, we all wish we could go back and do something Differently.

Yeah, absolutely. I love what you said there. This mindset shift that needs to happen because we're already doing things like tracking our sleep and tracking our steps and. Right. But this is a. This is sort of a next level mindset shift to be thinking about this kind of preventive screening on a more regular basis.

Well, there's more promise because we are diagnosing diseases that if you could change the course of those diseases, it could completely change your life.

Absolutely.

But it's also more scary because you might learn things that, you know, you start to sort of like doing a big exam where you see the results of the lifestyle you've been living for the last few years. So that can be confrontational. And trying to do that in a purposeful way, even purposeful in the sense of the clinics that were built and trying to. There's no white walls and no one is dressed like a doctor. It's meant to be very warm and comforting and to help people feel like they're not going into that sick care system, they're going into a different space that is a proactive space. And it's about sort of making small steps to help improve your health over the long term.

Absolutely. On this show, we often say that marketing really drives behavior change. And I've heard you say that you find a thrill in helping people shift well established worldviews. Have you seen positive examples of the work that you're doing to get the word out and educate? Can you sort of share that back? Um, and things that you're seeing, that, that it's, it's. It's resonating with people.

I would say the one that I noticed the most actually are the physicians who have changed, because physicians are. We think of them as sort of these godlike people that aren't the same as us. But all of those horrible stories that we've heard about health with cousins and aunties and family members, I mean, that's every day to them. And so what I've learned and come to appreciate over time is that doctors are almost as afraid to learn about their own health as the average individual consumer is.

Oh, interesting.

And the challenge a little bit is that they don't. It's really hard to admit fear. So oftentimes, when faced with that idea, a doctor will instead point to all of the other theoretical reasons why you shouldn't do a test. It's too expensive, might cause anxiety. It might, you know, maybe there's a false positive or something. You might have to deal with things. So when I take those Skeptics and really take them through the process and have them understand how it feels to really have knowledge about your health and have that peace of mind, hopefully, which is just really hard to communicate what that means to not have to think about your health every day.

Yeah.

And seeing doctors who are skeptical to referring all of their patients, I think for me, that's the biggest and most exciting mindset shift that I see.

Absolutely. Well done. Many preventive innovations struggle to prove ROI quickly enough to win over payers and partners and clinicians. And you just talked about the change you're already seeing there. What strategy do you have to continue to change that narrative?

Well, we're running a series of clinical trials right now, and those trials are prospective and designed to follow patients who are getting scans over their, you know, period of time in their lives and to understand how these screenings are helping to diagnose disease early. And what changes, positive and negative, might they be having on the health care costs that these patients are, I guess, consuming from the health care system?

Wow.

The anecdotal evidence is really positive that we're picking up undiagnosed disease in a lot of people and that it isn't generating a lot of downstream costs and it's not creating a lot of anxiety. But of course, to convince payers and insurance companies to cover this anecdotal evidence isn't enough. We need to be collecting this over a series of years, and I hope it doesn't take 20, 30 or 40 years, because we may not be around to see the results of that.

Right.

But it will take time. And that's what we're, we're really investing millions of dollars in collecting that evidence to really convince folks that this should be covered, at least for high risk people to start with.

And are you hopeful, are you seeing some signs that employers are interested in these types of investments?

Yeah, increasingly so. And something that's really nice, to be honest, is the challenge with preventive health in the US is typically when you change jobs, you change employees.

Right.

And so anyone insurance can, well, why would I pay for these tests if I'm not going to be able to take advantage of this if these employers are moving around all the time? And that's a big structural problem in the US but what's kind of cool is there are jobs that tend to be more blue collar, that tend to be in occupations that have a higher risk of cancer and disease by virtue of the occupation.

Sure.

Tend to also have the most loyal employees. These are people that might join a factory environment and they're there for 20 years. These are firefighters that join a fire brigade and they retire with that fire brigade and the fire brigade continues to pay the healthcare until they die. So there's in fact, the sorts of people that are often left behind when it comes to benefits, as are, in fact, the ones where the RRI is the easiest to prove.

Yeah.

So I'm really excited that the conversations we have with sort of companies and enterprises actually are these, you know, like these more traditional non white collar employers where you, you know, we run pilots and we see huge benefits from what we're doing.

Yeah. Build a great case study there and use that to convince other employers that this is an investment. If everybody, if everyone gets in on it, then everyone benefits, regardless of if people are job changing.

Right.

Because everyone should be investing in this.

And the goal long term is everyone would be covered.

Right.

But the way you start is not try and get everyone covered, but to focus on employers and insurance companies that are covering certain subsets of the population that are at high risk, either because they might have genetic predisposition syndrome or they might have an occupational risk. And if we can start there, I think, and continue to collect evidence, we can expand over time coverage for the wider population.

Love that. If you could share one uncomfortable truth about the future of healthcare, what would you say?

One uncomfortable truth. I start to worry. There's a lot of people out there that think that doctors are not interested in them being healthier in their health. We see this when we, we run a lot of stories on Instagram and so on, and someone might say, hey, you know, Prnuva helped me find cancer. And sometimes there'll be a lot of messages from people saying, oh, doctors just want you to get it as an advanced stage because they make more money. Or drug companies want you to have a stage four, because then they can. So I think they're. What makes me uncomfortable is I've met a lot of wonderful actors in the healthcare system that individually really, you know, want to do the best by their patients.

But the uncomfortable truth is the health system as it's set up, there's sort of the accumulation, the conglomeration of all these individual actors with good intentions is a system that doesn't work.

Yep, absolutely. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for joining me. This conversation was honest and rooted in some uncomfortable truths, but I appreciate you leaning into that and using your voice to drive for change in the system. And, yeah, I'm really grateful that you've joined me. And I want to say to our listeners to our viewers. Prenuvo has very generously offered a discount code. We will put that in the show notes so that you can take advantage of that and for them to get their very own full body MRI scan.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Available. Available nationwide.

Yeah. We have clinics now in 25 locations in the US and in Canada and in Australia, where I'm from, and in the uk. So we're starting to go where as many people are.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you. From the floor of the Health Conference 2025, this has been the Health Marketing Collective. Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you next.