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

In today’s episode, we’re joined by Vasanta Pundarika, CEO of Lotuspring, a renowned healthcare investment banker, and trusted advisor to industry leaders who are working to bridge the gap between clinical conviction and sustainable scale—especially in women’s and behavioral health. Hosted by Sara Payne, this powerful conversation dives deep into why so many healthcare brands are missing a pivotal movement in women’s health, what it takes to truly earn women’s trust, and how marketing, operations, and clinical teams can come together to create meaningful experiences that serve women holistically.

Women’s health is having a moment—but as Vasanta shares, it’s more accurately a movement, driven by years of systemic gaps and a growing recognition that the status quo isn’t enough. Despite the buzz, many organizations talk about leading in women’s health without making necessary investments or creating real, differentiated experiences for female patients. A veteran in both finance and healthcare, Vasanta unpacks what ‘good’ truly looks like when brands commit to women’s health. From aligning marketing strategy with clinical substance, to collaborating across the C-suite, to acknowledging and addressing patient experience pain points—today’s episode lays out a clear, actionable path for healthcare leaders and marketers ready to close the gap and build genuine, lasting trust with women.

The discussion explores real-world pitfalls like “pink washing,” the underestimation of women’s health complexity, and siloed planning between departments. Vasanta Pundarika also highlights industry standouts and the need for both niche and broad-based organizations to step up. Specific case studies in behavioral health, perimenopause, and cardiac care underscore the urgency of creating inclusive solutions, not just for women but for the health of families and communities at large.

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

Key Takeaways:

1. Move Beyond “Pink Washing”:

Simply rebranding existing services or adding “women’s health” messaging is not enough. Vasanta cautions against the pitfall of making things “pink” instead of developing real, differentiated clinical protocols and care pathways that address women’s unique healthcare needs. Authenticity and substance, not symbolic gestures, win trust.

2. Patient Experience Is the Product:

Women’s trust is built—or broken—in the details of the patient journey. Friction, complexity, or mismatched promises quickly erode brand loyalty. Brands that reduce barriers, provide holistic navigation, and deliver truly seamless experiences demonstrate that they “see” and value their female patients.

3. Alignment Across Marketing, Clinical, and Operations Is Essential:

Growth in women’s health—and sustainable, trusted brands—requires collaborative strategy development. Vasanta recommends convening marketing, clinical, operations, and strategy leaders together to ensure what’s being marketed is real, deliverable, and meaningfully distinct for women.

4. Word of Mouth and Community Influence Are Powerful Drivers:

The “voice of the customer”—listening to real women, collecting feedback, and amplifying their positive experiences—matters immensely in healthcare. Pilots, testimonials, and sharing what works for women allows brands to build authentic, organic trust and a broader community impact.

5. Don’t Underestimate the Scope of Women’s Health Needs:

Women’s health extends far beyond OBGYN care. Behavioral health, heart health, and other specialties have unique female presentations and logistical barriers. Leaders must invest in market research, engage with clinicians, and commit resources to understanding these distinctions. Inclusive care means considering medical, logistical, and cultural realities—and involving men in the education process as allies.

This episode is a blueprint for how marketers and healthcare leaders can move from talk to action, driving impact for women, families, and the entire healthcare landscape.

Welcome back to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. I'm your host, Sarah Payne, and I'm bringing you fascinating conversations with some of the industry's top marketing minds. Today's guest is someone who sits at the intersection of mission and money in healthcare. Vasantha Pundarika is the CEO of Lotuspring, where she helps women's health and behavioral health organizations translate clinical conviction into sustainable scale. After nearly two decades as a healthcare investment banker, she now advises CEOs on how to align strategy, operations and patient experience in ways that effectively drive growth. She brings a rare combination of financial fluency and and deep commitment to clinical impact. And she's become trusted advisor to leaders who want to build brands that women can believe in. Today, she's joining us to talk about why so many healthcare brands are missing the moment in women's health and what it takes to truly earn and keep women's trust.

Welcome, Vasantha.

Thank you. Thank you for having me, Sarah.

Yeah, you bet. I'm thrilled to have you here. This is a topic I think that's really important for brands to be thinking about and talking about. You have said that companies talk about wanting to lean to lead in women's health, but they're not making the investment required. What's the disconnect there?

I think whenever, you know, something feels exciting and everyone's talking about it, people feel like they need to get on that bandwagon. And women's health is in that space right now. There are a lot of people talking about menopause nationally. And so it feels really exciting. It feels like something people want to be part of. But I've seen so many companies try to say, like, hey, we're in women's health now, or we're doing something for menopause or we're doing something for perimenopause without actually focusing on what are the clinical differences between men and women and where are the actual clinical protocols we need to put in place? Like, how do we actually build a clinical plan around these women? How do we build something that is actually going to work for a woman? Like, why is women's health become a big thing? Because the health care industry as a whole has been missing women, right? Yes. So that's why people are starting to talk about it. That's why it's becoming a little bit bit more buzzy.

I would say. You said it was a moment. I would say it's not a moment, it's a movement.

Yes.

They are missing. They are missing the moment. But it is a movement in women's health. And, you know, if you just say, hey, we are now. You've put together a whole marketing campaign and you say, we are now in women's health, and you don't actually do anything to create, like, specific clinical protocols for those women, then you're actually just telling women that you're going to treat them differently and better, and then you're not. And then that creates a whole, you know, series of waterfall events that loses the patient experience, loses that patient, loses that patient trust. So I think bringing together your marketing team with the actual clinical team to build real programs that the marketing team can then market is a very. Is a very different way to do that than to say.

Than for the marketing team to say on their own, hey, this is really exciting that there's this whole women's health movement. We need to be talking about it. Because nationally, all these actresses, all of these, like, key people that we all know, you know, menopause was on Oprah. Right. You know, all these. All these people that we know are talking about it. We need to get into this and we need to be part of it. It shouldn't just be a marketing conversation.

It needs to be a joint marketing operations, clinical conversation and really become part of a strategy.

Love that. And, yeah, I mean, we have to, you know, pause briefly and acknowledge, like, it is amazing that we are having this movement, that we're here. Right. But now it unleashes, you know, a whole other set of challenges, which is, like, to your point, you can't just. You can't just dabble. You can't. Or you can't just force a marketing strategy without having that strong alignment with the clinical side and the operations side as well. So what does that look like? I mean, you've started to talk about what some of the planning and the strategies need to look like.

When a company says that they're truly committed to women's health, what does that look like in terms of operations, product, strategy? Like, actually reflecting that.

Yeah. Let me actually tell you how I got into women's health, because I think that'll segue nicely into answering this question. You said, I've been in healthcare 20 years, and that's true. If you'd asked me five years ago, what is women's health, I probably would have told you it's OBGYN care and just stopped. That is what I thought Women's Health was 15 years into working in healthcare. Women's health is actually all of the health care from the tops of Our heads to the bottoms of our toes. It's all health care for a woman's entire bodies. Right.

And I also work in behavioral health. And coming out of COVID I had a lot of residential care clients and behavioral health that kept asking me, why have our men's units filled back up and not our women's units? And I was thinking about, you know, a lot of the women that I know, and they're focused on their kids and their spouses and their parents, their spouse's parents, too, and their job, jobs, and they're on the other hand of things that they don't have time to actually. Or energy to actually prioritize or worry about. And these, these behavioral health companies that were on the residential side were expecting these women to leave that whole ecosystem that they're the linchpin of and come into residential care. Well, those women are not coming there until they're drag kicking and screaming. It's a much more severe patient. And that's just that, that's just the logistical side. Right.

There's also a whole clinical side to all of this. You know, women have different markers of depression and anxiety. We make less of the enzyme that breaks down alcohol sugars. We also make more or less of that enzyme depending on where our estrogen levels are. And once I started learning about all of that and thinking, hey, these companies are actually providing health care to women in the exact same way they're providing health care for men. And there's a logistical difference and a clinical difference. Well, what else are we missing in women's health then? And that's when I started looking into the rest of health care for women. And that's when you can't unsee it.

Right. Once, once you see these things, it's like, you know, brain health. 67% of Alzheimer's patients are women. Heart health, women's heart attacks show up very differently for the majority of patients. And so it's, there's, there's so much that we're missing there that to, to just say, hey, we're going to be in women's health now is not enough. It's, what are you actually doing in women's health? Like, if you're in women's heart health, do you have different standards of care? If you are in women's behavioral health, Do. Are you, are you actually thinking about what actually works for women? Not just. And this is a key point as well, like, not just through different reproductive cycles or different hormonal cycles.

Like, are you including all of that in your Care plan. But are you also thinking about the logistical side of what it means to a woman to get into care? Um, when women make a lot of the spending decisions for their family and a lot of the healthcare decisions for their family. So if you provide good healthcare for women and create that trusting relationship, they'll bring the rest of their family with them as well.

Yeah, so it's such a great point. So. So let's say a marketing leader, chief marketing officer, has a specific initiative, right. To be emphasizing building a brand for women's health. What would you advise them to be doing? What conversation, what questions do they need to ask? What. What expectations do they need to set? Right. You're coming in alongside of CEOs and executive leaders and advising them on this. What advice would you give to a chief marketing officer if.

If given this initiative to really grow a brand in women's health?

Yeah, I think if a chief marketing officer is. Is asked to, you know, grow a brand in women's health, I think they need to request, you know, a meeting of the minds between themselves, like the marketing team, but also the clinical team strategy and operations. Because if you're marketing something, I really believe you need to believe in what you're marketing. Right. And you can't build that full marketing plan without understanding what's going to happen on the clinical side, understanding what's going to happen strategically, and making sure from an operations perspective that this can actually all happen and that what you are marketing is actually going to come to fruition. So much in healthcare is about the patient experience. That's the actual product that we are creating. What is that experience for that patient? And so if that's the product and that's the product that you need to market, you need to understand what that product actually is.

What is the patient experience really going to look like for a woman who I'm marketing to? And I think doing this in silos is part of the reason that it often flops, and bringing it all together and really saying, hey, marketing is going to do this. We are going to build this initiative, but we need to understand what the patient experience looks like, and we need to understand what that clinical experience is going to be, what the strategy is going to be, and what the operations are going to look like so that we know what to market to our patients. Right. It's not enough to just say, hey, we're going to be in women's health. It's what is the experience that we are creating for women on our healthcare platform.

Absolutely. So getting all the Right. Leaders in the room. To have this conversation is important and there's got to be, I would imagine, some sort of an assessment period. Right. Which is just an assessment of how. What is the patient experience like today? Like, let's, let's all walk through, like, what is this like and actually getting in there and kind of experiencing it for yourself. What other sort of more either in depth questions need to be asked or what are some of the common pitfalls that you see would emerge during this assessment period?

I think so, first of all, that's exactly correct. Getting the right leaders in the room so we can coordinate all of these things together. To really understand what the patient experience is that you're selling, you need to understand what operations strategy and the clinical teams are all doing. But, you know, is it like a pitfall that I've seen a few times is almost like a pinking of the clinical strategy?

Pink washing.

Pink washing, thank you. That's a better way to say it. But where you take something and that already exists, whether it's the clinical strategy or the operations and just make it pink. Change the words change thing. You know, I think doing some like, making sure that there's been some market research done where, you know, you've actually spoken to the patients that are coming through the healthcare company today and found out what is actually missing for women within the healthcare company. You know, speaking to physicians and other clinicians on what are women actually missing here and what, what can we change rather than, rather than seeing that pink washing where it's exactly the same thing but with, you know, pink colors. My favorite color is blue, so I think it especially offends me.

Yeah, no, I agree. I also like blue.

What do you.

So we're talking a little bit about what women need to. To see or hear or, or likely what they don't need to see or hear. Right. Like, not more pink, please. Right. What does. What is the rest of sort of like what good looks like? Right. You know, that market research piece or voice of customer I think is incredibly important.

What needs to line up for women to believe that a brand really understands them.

I think women are very guided by what other women think and what has worked well for other women. I mean, you're the marketing expert, so you can tell me if that's not true. But that's really what I see is a lot of times, you know, when women see other women believing in something, it makes them want to go investigate it and think about it. So, you know, having some pilots and some test cases of really understanding what is the patient want. You call it the patient voice earlier, like, what does the patient actually need? And then making sure that whatever works well for the patient is broadcasted so that other people also understand. Like this is what has been working well for other people. I think women need to know that people are actually listening to them and hearing their concerns and not creating additional things for them to do, but rather making the whole patient process easier. You know, I have so many friends and family members that have gone around to 15 different doctors to try to figure out what, you know, a certain healthcare issue is.

That's healthcare gone wrong. You know, people shouldn't have to go to so many different specialists. They should be able to have some sort of, you know, some sort of care that can actually address. Like, hey, this is what we think you need to do. Like, go, go do it. So how can that patient experience be improved? I don't want to get too much onto the clinical side of things since I'm not a clinician, but I genuinely think that, you know, seeing what other women think, hearing what has worked, hearing that they're going to make your patient experience better, these are all things. And that hearing that people have actually asked other women what they actually want and need and that this is why women, we heard that you need this and that is why we are building this. I think that is really effective.

What I don't think is exciting or effective is when people create a pink tax. Let me create the exact same experience that a man is having and let me make it pink and let me charge you more for it. So I think creating some sort of genuine trust is really important. And to create that genuine trust, you need to hear from, you know, the clinical side and the strategic side to understand why something has been happening. And hearing that patient voice is so important. Hearing what other women are trusting is so important.

Yeah, I think that word of mouth piece is really critical. The voice of customer piece is really critical. A lot of great recommendations that you just mentioned there. And I totally agree with you that I think there are other, there are other challenges inside of healthcare that are exacerbating the poor experience that women are having, which is, I mean, you started to mention supplements, which is, you know, frequently sort of outside of the like standard norm of a conversation you might have with a primary care physician or an OB gyn. Like, of course they're going to talk to you about supplements, but there's a limitation in that. Right. Because it tends to be more. I'm just going to make I'm just going to make a generalization here.

Prescription based. Right. Versus like actually looking at it from a more of a functional medicine standpoint. Right. Like functional medicine is not a covered. Right. Largely not a covered care option under many health insurance programs. So it's just not part of the primary care experience.

And that I think further exacerbates some of the challenges that women might face in terms of looking for solutions to say, some of their perimenopausal challenges that they may be experiencing.

I think the key of what you just said is that women are looking for solutions and the healthcare system has largely missed women and so they are looking for solutions. And there's a lot of people out there that if someone's looking for a solution, they will provide them with something, an answer. Right. But it's not necessarily a solution that's actually going to help them and it's not necessarily the most cost effective or easiest or best solution out there. And you know, find it would, it would be amazing if we could have a way to actually find out what the real solution is and actually get clinical care so that we're not always out there looking for clinical care, looking for answers, looking for solutions.

Yeah. And to your earlier point, I mean I, you said, you know, lots of people, friends, family, what have you that have gone to, you know, dozens of physicians, care providers looking for answers. And I, you know, I have just as many examples as I'm sure you do. Right. Mean, this is so common and so, yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity to come alongside with some of the more of that, like guided, like icu. I'm going to help you navigate these challenges versus like this is the niche solution I can offer you. Right. Instead of my, you know, bag of tricks.

I'm just going to call it that. Right.

Yeah.

My niche lane that I'm going to play in. And then you go see next, you know, physician, next provider, and there's the next.

Yeah.

Anyway, something more holistic. Some of the more of that guided support I think would be. Would be amazing.

Icu. That's the phrase that you just used. The phrase ICU is so compelling.

Yeah.

You know, I was speaking at a conference a month ago or so when we were talking about women's behavioral health and you know, there were a lot of questions from the audience as to why we needed to focus on women's behavioral health specifically, as opposed to just general behavioral health. And you know, why is it a good business opportunity? Well, it's a good business opportunity. Because a lot of those women are not actually getting care today. You're not taking them from other providers. You're actually taking them out of the abyss and providing them that care. There's, you know, puberty and then, you know, fertility and childbirth and perimenopause and menopause. And those are just the hormonal changes. Right.

What about everything else that happens in between that are specific to women? And there's also different clinical protocols about, you know, how group therapy works versus not group therapy, individual therapy. How does it work for women in substance abuse? There's a lot of research into, you know, does AA work as well for women or. Or do they need to come up with a different list of protocols? And so there's just so much that our women. There's so much that's woman specific. And I'm harping on that particular, you know, clinical line just because it's easy to identify, but there's. There's a lot to be unpacked throughout our whole bodies.

Yeah. I was going to ask you where you see some of the biggest unmet needs in women's health. And it sounds like behavioral health is certainly what one of them are there, number one.

Yeah, sorry to interrupt you.

No, go ahead.

The number one killer of women is heart disease. And if you ask random people on the street, what do you think most women die from, they will probably tell you as breast cancer. As if we. As if we only have breasts and don't have other body parts as well. But that is the first thing that comes up for a lot of people. Not to minimize breast cancer is really horrific for a lot of patients. But, you know, a lot of people don't think through the thought process that, you know, women also have hearts. And that is the number one killer of women.

And women's hearts operate very differently than men's hearts. What I think is really important is when you're marketing to women for women's health, you need to also market to men because you need men to understand that women's health is different. And what they're hearing about their own health is not going to, in a lot, for a large part, correlate to women. And, you know, one of the reasons why a lot of women die from heart attacks is because their heart attacks go untreated, because they aren't having that left arm pain and jopping and nausea, by the way, are symptoms of anxiety as well. They might get sent home with anxiety medication instead of getting treated for their heart attack. And so if the men around Them also know that this could be an issue that is a huge game changer because not only is the woman actually suffering. No. But the men around her also know and they can insist on getting to see a cardiologist.

One of the things that that's just really connecting for me is as you're talking about this, brands and marketing leaders have a commitment to, if they want to build a brand in women's health, is not only to build that brand, but to own some of this education piece that you're talking about and closing some of the gaps that there may be in some of these different realities of whether it's symptoms or different solution types, et cetera. You know, really listening to, in that voice of customer and potentially market research and talking to other sort of clinical leaders. Where are those gaps today? And how can you as a brand really sort of step into that and help change the reality from an education standpoint?

Point, ABS Absolutely. I cannot, I cannot agree with that more. If you look at the women's health brands today that are doing really well, it's because they have created this whole repository of information, resources, research, so that people can actually find that kind of information. And, you know, I think it is so hard to find that information out there and it's so hard to know what to trust. Like, we shouldn't be going on Reddit, right? We should be going on, you know, real clinical sources, companies that providers that are actually for providing care in this space, to find information. And if there's information that is straight from a clinician, that is written in a way that real people can understand what it means, that's a game changer because people are always looking for. Women are always looking for solutions. And if you can provide them with information and solutions and guidance, resources, that's huge.

So who do you think is doing it? Well, in terms of building a brand in women's health?

There are. I was, I was thinking that you were going to ask me this question. There are a few companies that I think have been building a really good brand. They're younger, so we need to continue to see how they build and grow. But MIDI Health has been, you know, building a really big brand in the menopause space. And they, you know, are fit right into what you were just talking about. Right. They are adding a lot of resources and research and solutions for women on their website.

So they're not only providing the health care, but also providing all that information. And so I think that that would be something to look to. I want to see how it continues to play out, but Talkspace recently last month announced Chapters, which is a women's health specific mental health company mental health platform that they've created. I want to see how that continues to evol within Talkspace. I think they've been marketing it really well. But how, how does that continue to hold up? It'll be interesting to see that. I do think that we need both companies. I use those two examples because I think we need both companies that are in women's health specifically and companies that are broadly in health care that are building clinical lines for women.

I think we need both, it needs to come from both directions to be able to close that gap, because the gap is ginormous. And if you start paying attention to that gap and start really using that as your guiding light, it can feel a little overwhelming. You know, how, how am I actually going to fill in this gap? Right. Well, we need, we need companies that are in women's health only and we need companies that are, you know, in healthcare generally that are building those clinical lines. I also think there are a lot of companies that are in the ob GYN space that say they are women's health companies that need to then also broaden what they are doing and what they are offering so they can truly be women's health companies. Right, Interesting.

Yeah, we. Great point.

We often ask, average ob GYN appointment is like seven minutes long, somewhere between seven to eight minutes. And we often ask the ob GYN in that seven to eight minute appointment to treat all of our health care issues that we are having. And ob gyns are specialists, right? They are surgeons. They are a very specific kind of specialty and they get often asked to deal with, with people's, first of all, menopause. They have more menopause training than other people, but they don't. They're not specialists in menopause either. Behavioral health issues, you know, all kinds of other issues, gastrointestinal issues, heart issues. People ask their ob gyns in that seven minute appointment to treat all of that, which is, you know, a lot to put on one specialty.

That's such a great point. Yeah, such a great point. I mean, it seems painfully short seven minutes. Right. And like, as you talked about, like busy women, you know, what's the one.

Appointment you don't miss?

It's, it's, it's, it's like I've been literally waiting all year for this seven minutes. And so now I'm going to unleash on you all of the questions that I've Been thinking about, which, you know, might include my anxiety and the anxiety I have about these, you know, 15 other things that I need to tell about.

Yeah.

Which would be great. Okay, walk down the hall and here's this other, you know, book, book multiple visits at one time. Right. So you can see your ob GYN and then maybe a behavioral health specialist and a go right down the list.

Yeah. Because I mean, what is the one appointment that people don't skip? They're ob gyn. That's the appointment everyone goes to.

Which is great.

Which is great. Great.

But now we got to lean into that. Right. Like help them get, connect the dots to those other care needs.

Right. Because they are specialists in what they do. But doctors have this thought process of like a patient is in front of me asking questions. I want to help them, which is amazing. But we can't put all of that on OB GYNs. We need to spread that out amongst other providers as well.

We could go on forever. So many, so many different topics we could cover. I, I want to end on a few sort of quick fire type of, of questions. What's one thing that brands do instant, that just instantly loses women's trust.

From a marketing perspective?

I mean, you could, you could answer it from whatever perspective you want to. Really? Yeah.

I think when you make things too hard for people, you know, I've said a couple of times, the patient experience is really important. When I have a doctor's appointment and I have to, the night before the doctor's appointment, download an app that I'm going to not remember the password to, to literally just confirm my appointment for the following day that I made, like that kind of thing. That kind of friction in the healthcare system is really frustrating because as we said, a lot of women are going around to 15 different appointments trying to figure out what their healthcare issue is. Right. And to have that kind of friction in every single appointment is really frustrating. So I think reducing friction in the healthcare system is really important. So for a brand, it comes back to connecting with your operations team to make sure that that kind of thing isn't happening so that you as a brand can market it as we make things really easy for you. Because if you say we make things really easy for you and your operations team isn't doing that, that doesn't make any sense.

Now you have eroded that patient trust. Right. And so you need to put those two things together. And I think not understanding how women are different from men is really critical, a really critical mistake. Because, you know, women might then leave the health care system and not come back. They're not just going to another provider down the street. They might just decide that they don't trust the health care system altogether. I mean, there's so many things, right? Women's ligaments are different from men's.

Much more susceptible to ACL tears. And it takes a lot longer to rehab those ACL tears. That's something that, you know, a lot of people experience. Like I sprained my ACL earlier this year and if you, if I walk into a doctor's office and, you know, they say, oh yeah, ACL tears. But they don't specifically say, like, you're a woman and this is your ligament, all that kind of stuff. Like, I don't trust that anymore. And I want to know, I want to know that you see me. You said you have the words you see, you know, I see you.

I want to know that you see me and you're taking care of me as a patient.

Right.

Very specifically. And I think also when, you know, not all women are created equal either. Medicine in the United States is often based off of a 72 kilogram white man. And we can't go from that to saying, now we're looking at, you know, x kilogram white woman. If we're going to actually provide health care to everybody, we need to actually be providing health care to everybody. You know, menopause and perimenopause appear in different ways at different times across different groups of people. And we need to specifically be studying that. Lupus, for example, is much more prevalent as an autoimmune disease.

Much more prevalent in minority women.

Very interesting. I want to pivot just, just temporarily away from women's health for a minute. A minute. Because I know you advise executives of, you know, a lot of different healthcare companies and background, and I know you're, you're passionate about this specific topic. But when should founders not be the face of the brand?

Oh, the face of the brand.

Voice of the brand. Face of the brand.

Yeah. I think when you, when you grow to, that's an interesting question. When you grow to a specific size where it becomes less about the founder and more about the healthcare you're actually providing, I think that should happen like pretty quickly. I actually don't like it when founders are, you know, the face of the brand for, for too long. I know they need to do it at the beginning to market the company because a lot of early sales for a company are founder led sales. But over time and pretty quickly, I think you need to start to develop the actual healthcare you're providing as the face of the brand. That patient experience that you're providing, that needs to be the face of the brand, not the person that founded it. Because that's really great that the person who founded it founded it.

But it's really about the patient experience that you're building. Like Mark Randolph, the founder of Netflix. I didn't know what his name was until last year, maybe.

Yeah, great point.

But I have been having a great experience with Netflix for many, many years. Like, I've been streaming all of their TV shows for years. But I didn't know that he was the founder until last year. And I think that that is. I think that that really takes. It takes that patient experience that makes it front and center, because then you've disconnected from who is the founder and you've connected it to. This is the patient experience that we're providing. And that's what I'm marketing to you.

That's why you should come to us, because we're actually going to solve your problems and find solutions for you so that you don't have to go looking for solutions anymore. That's huge.

Yeah, I mean, there's, there's, there's examples on both sides. Right. Because you got the Steve Jobs example on the other side.

Yeah.

But they become more the. What's the word I'm looking for? Evangelist of the experience, the consumer experience. In this case, we're talking about patient experience. Right. And I think Steve Jobs did a great job of that, of becoming sort of the evangelist of. We're going to do things differently. Right. We're going to lean on design that's very, you know, it's all about the user experience.

And it's, it's easy to understand, like you do. You could put it in your hand and you know how it works, right? Yeah. And then in that case, it wasn't necessarily about him. It was more about being the evangelist for that experience, which he seemed to really understand.

You're absolutely right. It wasn't about him. It was about the user experience that he was highlighting. And so I say that here, too. Like, the founder can be out there talking, but they need to be talking about the patient experience and be highlighting that.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I do see some founders really focusing on that and really highlighting the patient experience and highlighting the experiences that other patients have.

Yeah, absolutely. So now I'm going to go back to Women's Health for one last question to end on. So if you could leave healthcare marketers with one takeaway about, about earning women's trust, what would it be?

Connect your marketing team with your clinical team, with your strategic team, and make sure that you are actually marketing something that has really been built from the ground up that really has some substance and teeth to it. Because if you get that women's health patient, if you get that woman in the door and you build something and you've marketed something to them that is like, really an amazing patient experience, and you live up to that, you're gonna have that patient for a long time. And guess what? You have that patient for a long time that brings down your LTV to CAC ratio. And that's what marketers are worried about, right?

Yeah, absolutely. No, it's such great advice that I, when you were talking earlier about, you know, making the experience easy and don't tell someone you're gonna make it easy and then it's not. But if you tell me that you're gonna make it easy and then it was actually truly easy for me, just.

As you said, I'm gonna tell everybody about it.

I'm gonna tell everybody about it. You've got me. Hook, line, the singer, sinker, loyalist for life. Right? Like I am. I am in 100% on that. Such great, great point. Great advice. Thanks so much for joining me today, Vasantha.

Thank you so much, Sarah. This was an amazing conversation. I loved it.

Likewise, when I want to remind our audience to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss out on our next bold conversations that are coming your way in 2026. Thanks for joining us on the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence, because the future of healthcare depends on it. We'll see you next time.

Thank you.