Today’s Advertiser helped make the production and delivery of this episode possible, for free, to you! But the themes expressed by the guests do not necessarily reflect the views of Inside Reproductive Health, nor of the Advertiser. The Advertiser does not have editorial control over the content of this episode, and the guest’s appearance is not an endorsement of the Advertiser.
Back as CEO.
Gina Bartasi, returning CEO of Kindbody, provides a look at the strategies behind Kindbody's recent success and their vision for the future. Gina talks about Kindbody’s announcement of profitability, new initiatives, and lessons learned by the company.
Tune in as Gina Bartasi explores:
The strategies behind Kindbody’s profitability last quarter (And what that means moving forward)
The introduction of a new celebrity partnership aimed at opening doors for fertility awareness
The tension between the volume of care required and maintaining high-quality service
Her response to last year’s Bloomberg articles
The delicate balance between business operations and medical practice in the clinical setting
Kindbody’s technology investments (Why they’re banking on their own EMR)
Gina Bartasi
LinkedIn
Instagram
Twitter (X)
[00:00:00] Gina Bartasi: We intentionally built an IVF clinic and a lab in very expensive retail space. That's a mistake to do for a couple of reasons. First of all, retail space is very, very expensive and an IVF lab, your patient is asleep the majority of the time that they're there. The IVF lab is not conducive to a retail office space.
If IVF clinic in a retail space, you're going to have disproportionately more issues. By the way, no four wall business is immune to leaks. Outages related to electricity and they're not immune to it. That's why you have generators. That's why you have other things. All four wall businesses, I don't care if you're Shake Shack or Kindbody or any other fertility clinic network, what you want to do is mitigate those leaks and outages and other things.
[00:00:45] Kevin Ali: Hi, I'm Kevin Ali, CEO of Organon and at Organon, we're committed to engaging with leaders across reproductive medicine. So I'm excited to introduce today's guest. Gina Bartasi, founder and [00:01:00] executive chairman of Kindbody, a New York City based fertility network with a mission to democratize access to healthcare.
[00:01:08] Sponsor: This episode was brought to you by Organon. Organon is committed to championing care equity in fertility. By elevating education, expanding resources, and investing in innovative solutions, Organon stands with aspiring parents on their unique journeys. Learn more at fertilityjourney.com.
Announcer: Today's advertiser helped make the production and delivery of this episode possible.But the themes expressed by the guests do not necessarily reflect the views of Inside Reproductive Health, nor of the advertiser. The advertiser does not have editorial control over the content of this episode, nor does the advertiser sponsorship constitute an endorsement of the guest or their organization. The guest's appearance is not an endorsement of the [00:02:00] advertiser.
[00:02:01] Griffin Jones: Thank you, Kevin. And actually, we had Kevin record this just before Kindbody's announcement, where Gina is no longer just the chair of Kindbody. She's back as CEO. Ask her why and what she's up to. This is coming after Kindbody reported being profitable last quarter.
This gets us talking about doctors and that hairy line between operations and the practice of medicine that you know I don't think is separable. So I asked Gina how it can be. I ask if Kindbody is going to close locations. Gina talks about the countries and cities they might go to next and the quality of care they're in versus the needs that docs and staff have.
I'd love to know what you think of this conversation. As always, send me an email and enjoy this conversation with Gina Bartasi. Ms. Bartasi, Gina, welcome back to the Inside Reproductive Health podcast yet again. I think this is time number three for you.
[00:02:51] Gina Bartasi: I think that's right.
[00:02:52] Griffin Jones: The other episodes were popular, by the way.
I'm pretty sure at least one is in the top five. They might both be in the top [00:03:00] ten of listens. So we'll see how we do with, with number three and, uh, and I look forward to talking to you about highs and lows of the past, more so about the future. Um, but even before we do that, this, this might be old news by the time people listen to this, cause this Recording will probably come out in a couple weeks.
But as of right now, you just this week announced two big things. Um, one has to do with the profitability of Kindbody. The other has to do with, uh, the new CEO who is someone we know. And so let's, let's talk about those things. And, uh, let's talk about you coming back as CEO. Why you? Why now?
[00:03:49] Gina Bartasi: Now, you mentioned two big announcements, uh, this week.
I thought you were going to mention, um, today we announced a partnership with Sloane Stephens, uh, the tennis star, [00:04:00] uh, and the campaign is called Open the Doors. We want to open the doors and open the dialogue to fertility, to fertility preservation. And so Sloane Stephens, the other thing we believe at Kindbody that's been fundamental since our beginning.
is to ensure that we're creating, uh, diversity and equality for all patients of all ethnicities. So I actually thought that's where you were going to start, Griffin, is with a world renowned tennis pro. Uh, sure, if you want to talk about me, uh, returning to CEO of Kindbody, it's a privilege and an honor.
You know our team, our doctors, they're world class. Um, the company did report, uh, revenue visibility of 225 to 250 million. Uh, which is meaningful. This company is still young. It's only five years old. Uh, we, we opened our first clinic in Midtown Manhattan, actually in Flatiron, Manhattan, uh, less than five years ago.
So to be less than five years and tracking towards anywhere close to a quarter of a billion dollars is meaningful. The other point you [00:05:00] mentioned, which is important to our teammates is, uh, profitability. Uh, people know that are in the venture community, this J curves, you invest, invest, invest, we've invested heavily.
Tens of millions of dollars in our proprietary technology. We have our own kind, uh, electronic medical record, our own patient portal, um, and so we've invested millions of dollars there. We've also invested millions of dollars in new locations. Um, our peers that are listening in know it cost a couple of million dollars to open a new world class state of the art IVF clinic with an IVF lab, and in addition to a couple of million dollars to open a clinic, you have operating losses the first year.
That's no surprise. No one opens a new clinic that's profitable from day one, ever, never, it's never been done. So you carry operating losses and then most forecasts to break even about month 24, better operators are able to get to break even about month 18. Uh, we're able to break even a little earlier than [00:06:00] that, call it anywhere from month 12 to month 15 when we have employer sponsorships, when we have really attractive managed care contracts, uh, when we have a brand.
That's where we always like to start. The reason Kindbody has so much attention is because It's because unlike some of the other networks that are peers where they have very disparate brand names for these clinics, uh, Kindbody is one brand and that's intentional because since the beginning we've talked about the consumerism of healthcare.
So the other thing that creates a faster time to profitability is when we go into a new market and there's already pent up demand from self pay patients because they know this brand Kindbody. And we're grateful again today that, The big announcement to me is not about Kindbody or about me returning as CEO.
It's about how we create more equality to family building care. And that starts with Sloane Stephens. Uh, representing other young, she's 31 years old, uh, athletes, social influencers, and people [00:07:00] of color.
[00:07:01] Griffin Jones: I think the big announcement is you coming back as CEO because of all of those things. Kindbody is so big and has so many different initiatives that being at the helm is, uh, a pretty hefty responsibility.
And I don't know a ton about CEOs that have come back. I think the only one that I can think of is Steve Jobs. And that's a sort of, you know, that's a sort of, you know, renowned story that people still think of. Uh, because if there was a time when Apple was n Not what it is. And then all of a sudden, iPod, iPad, iPhone.
And, uh, so what does that look like for you? What are you coming back in to see, to see this job done for? Because I have a feeling that Steve Jobs came back to make sure that those things are what came to fruition. Why you at this time?
[00:07:59] Gina Bartasi: Yeah. [00:08:00] Um, humbly as it sounds, I probably know the business best. I'm probably most qualified to lead the company into the next five to 10 years.
I know the players. I know, uh, I respect, I actually like the player, player, the other players. We don't ever call them competitors. You will never hear us call any of the other large networks. Or even any of the other Fertility Benefit Administration companies, um, competitors, their peers. We talk about and coined this term coopetition.
We believe we're stronger together when we align and partner to create a bigger pie, a bigger, a bigger pie instead of arguing over the same small piece of pie. Um, I think the, you know, my returning is, is just easy. Uh, it's natural. Again, I know. I know the employer market. I know the consumer brand market.
Uh, the managed care is, is, is the beast that we all have to work with. Uh, as CEOs of large networks, [00:09:00] we certainly know the industry has gone more towards managed care. It's changed pretty dramatically. Um, I read and respect, I mean, I was going to say it was you, Griffin, it was actually a banking analyst that had David Keefe.
He was a total rock star at NYU, but he talked about patient demand and how it changed a decade ago. It was primarily self pay, and today, there's some sort of sponsor, whether that's an employer sponsor or a managed care sponsor, and what that means to the economics of the fertility center. A, the reimbursements are lower, and B, the collections Um, you know, I'm, I'm back as CEO, um, because there's a tremendous amount of opportunity in the future.
We're at the very, very early endings of what we think is, uh, continued growth in the market. There are changes and I'm, uh, it's easy for me to adapt and see the changes just given the tenure. I've spent the last 12 years in the industry and again, [00:10:00] I'm honored to work and, and, and And call so many of the other CEOs, uh, again, friends and, and peers of ours and mine.
[00:10:07] Griffin Jones: You were still during, active with the company during that time, but do you feel like that you had some time to reflect on things that you would do differently this go around? Because I've, I've never stepped down as owner of my own company, but I do think of, of, you know, mistakes that I made and, uh, things it's like, okay, I.
know what I would do differently this time around. And I think one of the things One of the hardest things that you can do in business is hire people, lead people, keep them happy, get them what they need to be happy. It's really hard. And There was a time where I know that I didn't do the best by my people.
What I was doing was having them do too much for my good people. I wasn't keeping track of what I was having them being responsible for. So [00:11:00] I kept piling stuff up on their plate without having a map for them for growth, without having enough recognition for them. What then that allowed for was when you have a couple of people that aren't a good fit, come into the organization, then it's really easy to, to sour that bunch because you have good people that aren't, aren't being taken care of the best.
And I was guilty of that. And I was, and I was doing it because, uh, you know, it is, it is effing hard to run. a business. You know, I can't imagine running a company the size of Kindbody. I run a organization, you know, seven figure organization, you know, with a couple dozen people, including the part timers and the independent contractors.
And it's still crazy to me. But I did learn what I needed to change about that. And I didn't have to bust all the way down to the foundation, but kind of had to bust down to the studs and think about what I had to do differently, and that was make sure that there's a seat for every person that is crystal clear with the [00:12:00] outcomes and then have an HR and administrative system that could be really supportive.
Um, and it's a, it's a hard lesson to learn, and I don't feel like I've mastered it yet. When I do, I'll write a New York Times business book that, uh, people can pick up in the airport. Um, But it is a lesson that I've really gotten better at. And it was one that was hard for me. And I have to admit that I didn't do the best job the first go round.
You having the opportunity to still be in the organization, but not be in that top C suite for What was it, two years or something like that? Plus years, yeah. What are you coming back with now saying, I either wish that I had done this differently or this is what I'm going to do differently this time around?
[00:12:44] Gina Bartasi: Yeah, thanks Griffin. Uh, a couple of things before we talk about my mistakes and, uh, if we talked about all of them, I know this is a long form content show, but we would be, uh, well into the evening hours. I'll share just a couple of lessons learned. I also think it's worth noting [00:13:00] I'm a couple of decades older than you, and so you want to do this lifelong learning, and you do, you hope that you are a servant based leader to your team, to your patients, and that you're constantly learning and adapting and working to get better.
I think the folks that don't work at Kindbody, Uh, don't work well are the ones that say, I don't have anything to learn and I'm not trying to get better. Those folks usually don't fit well into Kindbody. Kindbody there's an ethos that we're constantly learning. We're constantly treating each other with kindness and as a partner and as a team.
Um, you, I, I hope, I think you get better the more you do it and the bigger organizations you scale. Kindbody is significantly larger than, Progyny ever was and then is today. Kindbody has 850 full time employees. Uh, when I stepped away from progyny, I think we were 160, 165 employees. I know they're larger today, but I think they're around 250, 300 employees.
But your point is, it is, [00:14:00] it gets easier as you get older because you learn lessons and hopefully when you're progressing, you're like, okay, I'm not going to make that same mistake again. Um, but I have a, the Kindbody is for sure the largest company that I've run. And then what you have to do is be humble and you have to be honest and you have to ask for, you have to hire people smarter than you, people that are more experienced than you.
And you have to say, I need your help. I haven't done this before. I haven't, haven't done X, Y, Z and, and believe it or not, most people want to help each other. Most people do. I just don't. Fundamentally believe that every day when I wake up, most people want to help other people. Most people are humble and most people are trying to do their best and do better every day.
So that's on the people front. On the mistakes front, as I was executive chairman and Annbeth Eschbach, who I adore, she was like, man, it's so much easier sitting up there than down here, down here in the day to day. I was like, I know, I get it. It's lovely. Because, you know, I only have one direct report, it's Annbeth.
I mean, to your point, the hard part is running all the people [00:15:00] functions. And so, when you step back, you know, the mistakes now look like easy and dumb mistakes. They were hard because we ran them. But remember this consumerism of healthcare. We wanted to build these fertility clinics Around where our patients work and play.
So we intentionally built an IVF clinic and a lab in very expensive retail space. Okay, that's a mistake to do Griffin. For a couple of reasons. First of all, retail space is very, very expensive. In an IVF lab, your patient is asleep the majority of the time that they're there. So you need these retail locations to be where the patient's spending the majority of time, which is for monitoring, but not for an IVF lab.
The other thing is, the IVF lab is not conducive to a retail office space. Uh, we should all talk about Bloomberg, uh, and our friends at Bloomberg. They love to call a flood in LA. It's not a flood. It's a leak. If you talk to any of our extraordinary clinicians, we had a leak. You're going, if you try [00:16:00] to repurpose this as a valuable lesson, if you try to build an IVF clinic in a retail space, you're going to have disproportionately more issues.
By the way, no four wall business is immune to leaks, outages related to electricity, Thank you. And they're not immune to it. That's why you have generators. That's why you have other things. All four wall businesses, I don't care if you're Shake Shack or Kindbody or any other fertility clinic network, what you want to do is mitigate that, those things, those, uh, leaks and outages and other things.
So for sure, going forward, one of the things that was easy to do up here is to say, okay, what would we have done different? And for sure, The IVF lab should be in a medical office building that is already built out for an HVAC equipment, already built out and you can put a generator on the roof. There are, like, that just seems, everybody else listening to the show is going to say, yeah, that dummy.
Okay, yes, call me a dummy. Uh, but we really had this intent to, to make this so patient centered [00:17:00] and so consumer focused, but you won't. We are opening two more locations in the summer under that old model. Again, in Miami, it's this big, beautiful retail location with the IVF lab. Same thing in Charlotte.
Going forward, we're opening five new centers next year. You will not see. IVF labs in expensive retail office setting. Um, so that's one major lesson learned.
[00:17:21] Sponsor: Organon is dedicated to delivering impactful medicines and solutions for a healthier tomorrow. Guided by its mission of being here for her health.
Organon proudly recognizes fertility providers around the world focusing on care equity. We believe everyone should have access to fertility education and treatment. By collaborating with providers, advocates, and communities, Organon is working to elevate fertility awareness, expand resources, and invest in innovative products that help more aspiring parents access the care they [00:18:00] deserve.
Every journey to parenthood is unique. Organon stands with you. Learn more about Organon's resources at fertilityjourney.com.
[00:18:11] Griffin Jones: It sounds like a good lesson, but people are able to call you a dummy for that if they do because they're right about that one thing. But when you're trying something new and something different, you're trying a whole new thing.
And it's like, okay, these are the things that are true about the status quo that add value. But We're still right about these other areas and what you're trying to do is create an entirely different type of brand for a much larger scale of patients than what we currently have and so it still is the case and In, in many cases that we want to have this type of brand, we want to have, we want to have this type of retail access at the clinic level, just not at the lab level and, uh, people can say, oh, haha, but [00:19:00] they're, it's, they're not trying for the whole thing.
Trying for the whole thing, you're inevitably going to have a couple of those things where people get to say, I told you so. Um, but. the, the idea is that you're going to have other things that you're going to be able to, to, to get to say, I told you so. Um, you mentioned Bloomberg and I would be a crappy interviewer if I didn't discuss it a little bit.
I'm more interested in talking about the future, but the Bloomberg thing was interesting to me because, and my publication covered Bloomberg's coverage, but there was one thing that we discussed in their coverage that they didn't mention. And there's something I believe, there's a few tenets of journalism that I believe in that I don't watch.
like the cable news or any of this like political informed news one way or the other because I just wanna, I wanna see the news and I believe in that local news standard. A couple of those principles are you don't use words like several or many. What does that mean? There were several people. Does [00:20:00] that mean 40 people?
Does that mean 4,000? You don't use adverbs chillingly, alarmingly. And then you On the other hand, you also try to give some context of, well, where else are these things happening and, uh, and, and some other things. And I'm not saying that there weren't mistakes made at Kindbody, and I'm not saying there weren't bad practices at, at places, but what I am, but a question that was unanswered to me was, well, where else is this happening?
So we might be reporting on the divorce rates of postal workers, and maybe postal workers have high divorce rates, but one thing I want to ask is why postal workers? Why not? grocery clerks and lawyers and dentists. And, uh, and so one thing that we reported on was that, uh, Bloomberg just didn't even mention if they had looked into this with other networks.
And so that coupled with the timing of the article was, it was like, why, the public doesn't [00:21:00] care if it happens right before ASRM, like, and that. is supposed to be Bloomberg's audience. Uh, and again, I'm not saying that there wasn't, like, there wasn't anything legitimate that they report on or anything that, you know, Kindbody might not be proud of that happened.
Some of those things could happen. It just seemed to me like that question wasn't answered and that timing was strangely motivated for an audience. Um, and do you think it's any other reason than your size? Like, you're just so big that this is the first time your mainstream media is going to You know, look at a company.
[00:21:35] Gina Bartasi: Yeah. I mean, you, you bring up all great points, right? The amount of salacious clickbait adverbs, and they also name drop. They always name dropped our largest customers and our celebrity investors. And so it's a shame because, you know, I grew up, I grew up. I grew up in radio and television. I grew up in the media.
I was, I come from, I was a publisher of magazines. We used to pay a dollar a word to writers. [00:22:00] Today, you know, reporters, you know, it's hard. They have, they have to issue clickbait and adverbs and all these catchy adjectives just to get it. You know, and, and, and lead with something negative and salacious just to get reader's attention because readers no longer trust, uh, legacy journalism.
They turn to their friends, okay, they're going to turn to user generated content for a referral of a fertility doctor, a referral of a restaurant, or where to buy a car. Today the media landscape has changed where today's readers value more user generated content. Over legacy content. And what that's done as a former publisher and media executive is put enormous pressure on the value of good journalism.
And that's what's driving. This type of salacious content, because you just didn't see it out of Bloomberg, um, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a very, used to be a highly valuable, uh, news outlet, but [00:23:00] all of them, I'm not picking on Bloomberg, but they intentionally, I, I, I also noticed they never cited any other uh, Uh, fertility clinic, you know, we tried to draw an analysis from some Harvard research papers, uh, a paper Denny did at Boston IVF, an extraordinary program.
And you know, what happened when the, we knew Bloomberg was going to write it because they asked us to verify all this. And I went to, we hired external comms, just like any other company would hire external corp comms. And they said, Gina. You know, welcome to the big league. This happened to Uber, Airbnb, and because you have created this high profile, very valuable, very consumer centric brand, That's why you're a target, you know, if you were one of these disparate programs around the country, that there's not any national brand.
So, you know, just get used to it. It's interesting that, um, the [00:24:00] reporter was, was always negative in tone, too, like they never gave us the benefit of the doubt, even when we provided them. Um, data and facts, they ignored that. And so we're work, we're actually working, we're trying to, we're trying to help Bloomberg understand the industry, understand what's changing.
And so why, what I would say is what's under the bridge is water under the bridge. And our goal right now is to move forward, um, with Bloomberg and help them learn about the industry. And we're going to remain optimistic. Now. You parlay that or you, you, you lay that on the backdrop of, you know, Kindbody's been incredibly fortunate to have a ton of positive press, right?
And that is the intent we set out to do. We wanted to build a brand, a trusted brand so that you, when you went into a new community, when we went into Denver, when we opened in Denver, which is a very competitive market with some really remarkable physicians, Those clinics [00:25:00] there, that's what I tell employers all day long.
I tell employers everybody is equally good at their craft. I say that. Our peers are all extraordinary physicians, they're extraordinary. We go into Denver and because we had a Kindbody brand, we had 55 patients prepared to cycle before we opened the door. Same thing in Newport Beach, we've been waiting for our Newport Beach location to open, which just opened about three weeks ago, the brand opening was last week.
Um, but it's rewarding to us who are working so hard to treat this patient population to go into market and already have demand. And that's what the national brand does, right? We were on the Today Show this morning with Sloane Stephens. We get the responsibility we have as a national brand, you know, and as we talk about the future, we really think about Kindbody in terms of a global brand.
Our employers today are asking us to open locations in Canada. They've mapped it out for us, Canada, London, Dublin, Singapore. Um, so we really think [00:26:00] about how we protect, um, and groom, um, this, this world class brand. And that brand really starts with our physicians. For And it starts with enveloping the patient in kindness and making sure every single day we wake up, how can we serve that patient, um, better, more kind, telling a patient, you're going to have problems having a child and you're going to need expensive medical treatment.
It's a devastating discussion and it is very difficult for anyone to have, even if you've been having it for 25 years or you're 25 days in a recent fellow. And so we just want to make sure that the kindness extends from our front desk teammates to our nurses, to our clinicians, to our revenue cycle management folks, that we envelop this patient population in kindness.
And we've created this brand and it was intentional. So, you know, I think the takeaway is. CORPCOM's team said, you know, you're going to have this kind of scrutiny. Prioritize [00:27:00] patient care, stay on your mission, and, you know, it's, it's just part of, you know, it's just part of creating a national, soon to be global brand.
[00:27:08] Griffin Jones: I want to try to thread the needle between the good press and the bad press because you are going to be a target because of your size, no matter what, whether you're good, bad, or neutral, you're going to be a target for media. You're interesting. There's simply more to report on Walmart than there is on D.
C. Joey's General Store in Tallahassee. There's more to report on. You've got more irons in the fire. And I also was critical of that they just didn't give context of like, did we look in other companies? The question of why Kindbody wasn't answered. That's the question. Why postal workers? X or or A or B, whenever it's a, a, a, a type of, of trend feature.
And I also think having a, it, it, I don't think it was newsworthy enough to merit a a series. Those were my criticisms of it. It doesn't mean that none of the complaints that were levied were were valid. And I [00:28:00] wanna talk about, uh, physicians because this is something that I hear from physicians across the board and I'm on, I have differing opinions based on.
What physicians are telling me and I'm not talking about from kind body I'm talking about from other practice maybe kind body But also every kind of network and even independent practices and academic practices Which is they feel like we're being pushed to do IVF We've got to do this much volume and on one hand I can empathize with I could absolutely see blood sucking capitalists come in and trying to squeeze every penny out and push it to the, to the max.
On the other hand, uh, we have to be doing more cycles than we're doing now. Everybody talks about access to care, but we ain't gonna be doing access to care if docs are doing 150, 180 retrievals a year. We have to make an infrastructure where docs are being able to do a thousand plus retrievals a year.
That requires a ton of technology and support, and it, is really hard [00:29:00] to build that type of system because if docs think a thousand cycles a year, two thousand, whatever it is, they think based on the type of work that they're doing today, not a work where a lot of their work is either automated or some of it's eliminated and the rest is delegated to people.
Lower on the license hierarchy. What type of, you know, so given that this is a concern that docs may have had at Kindbody that they have everywhere, what is, what is your, and I know you've invested in your EMR, tell me about the technology and the support that you need to leverage in order to, to get the productivity from docs that's necessary to scale the care that patients absolutely need with also.
You know, I'm not driving people into the ground.
[00:29:52] Gina Bartasi: Yeah, no, you've already brought up the point that we try, uh, with our doctors. First of all, it starts with teaching, treating [00:30:00] your doctor, uh, like a teammate and a partner. All of our doctors are equity owners. From the day they walk in the door, they own equity.
We have departed doctors that still own equity and kind body. Um, but we had one of our doctors say, wait a minute, at my last private practice, we were wildly profitable with 180 cases. Why do I have to do 240 cases to be profitable here? And we just, you, you have to take the time, you have to treat with kindness, and you have to educate.
You have to say, remember our mission. So, the first thing is to make care more affordable, and so if you lower the price, you have to increase volume, like you, you just articulated it perfectly, but if you say that to doctors without bringing them along and educating them, there is going to be this discord between your doctors and the institutional money, um, and so you have to, you have to slow down and you have to say, here doctors, and then you have to help educate them and empower them, you have to give them their [00:31:00] own P& L.
You have to say, here's your clinic P&L and let us help you. Like our doctors are starved to learn. When I said at the beginning of the show, you know, it starts with an eagerness of curiosity and wanting to learn and do better every day. I could tell you right now that every single one of our REIs wakes up every single day wanting to do more, wanting to get better at medicine, wanting to get better at business.
Every single one of them wants to be a business owner and they want to learn about, you know, Financial management and being good stewards of their clinic, but if you say you have to do 250 cases and you don't educate them, listen, if we kept the price high They don't have to, they don't have to do any more cases, it's as easy as that, they can do a, that's, that was her point, we, I used to do 180 cases, why can't I just do 180 cases here, I said great, let's just keep prices high, and the pool small, and we'll just sell services to rich, white, dual income families, and she was like, ah, No, we can't do that.
Our mission is to bring [00:32:00] down the cost of care and to create accessibility and, uh, equity amongst all. And I was like, right. And so once they, there's a light bulb and they are in locked step with us because you have to find REIs that are aligned with our mission. That for too long, fertility care has been for a very privileged few.
It's Pride Month. We have pride flags outside of all of our clinics. I hope our peers do my guts as they do. But we are very vocal that the cost of care must come down. And the way you do that is through technology, through APPs, extenders. You've got to have the REIs at the top of their license. You know, when we've talked to other REIs about joining Kindbody, when they say Me or I, me or I, that means they're not going to work well at Kindbody, because this is not a team.
There is no I in team, that old cliche. And the other thing that says they [00:33:00] mean they're not going to work well at Kindbody is when they insist on doing everything. Well, I have to do my own ultrasound scans. I have to call in this script for the patient. And I'm like, you know, guys, the cost of care is coming down.
David Keefe told us that in an analyst report, all physicians. There are physician owners and all CEOs of all other networks know that. Hopefully they've modeled that for their PE sponsors. The cost of care is coming down, it's being driven by managed care, and it's being driven by the employers. And so then the question is, going forward, how do you build a better mousetrap?
How do you bring the cost of care down? But still ensure profitability in the health of your clinics. And again, at our technology, there is no paper. Um, I had a patient reach out to me. Patients still reach out to me, which make my day. And a patient reached out to me, no kidding, yesterday. I don't know how he got, it's a same sex couple.
He texted me. He said, hey, I'm just trying to pay you. But I've been trying to call your call center and I've been on hold. First of all, we don't want patients to be on hold [00:34:00] and I regret that this gentleman was on hold. I said, if you'll send me an email, I'll get you to the right people. He sent me an email.
I said, dear, and his name. I said, have you tried paying your credit card on your patient portal for his surrogate? So within 60 seconds, he wrote back. He was like, all done. That was easy. Like, you know, and so you, you have to, because he's just a patient. He presumes in traditional healthcare, there is not a Easy, convenient, tech forward way to pay your bill online.
So his immediate inclination is to pick up the phone and call us to pay us. Thank you. But our goal is to not have a call center with 200 people trying to take your credit card written down over the phone. We know we want to do everything securely for the patient and the best way to do that is to come into our HIPAA compliant patient portal and you enter your own HIPAA compliant Uh, gender identity, your own partner information, your own insurance information, and your [00:35:00] own credit card information.
It's most secure to do it that way. But it's interesting, the patient population today does not think technology first. And he was like, thank you for building it so easy. Now we have to go back to our team and say, why didn't this guy know that? What can we do when you're in our patient portal to make it easy to say pay here?
So that, because, you know, what I heard from that is he had to wait to get us paid, and so we have to do better about that, but, you know, we're trying to change healthcare from paper and not a lot of workflow process. You know, a lot, historically, doctors got to do their own thing, and they got to do their own, and we want, we want consistency.
The 32 year old PCOS patient, who has the exact same data markers. And assume her partner is heterosexual with the exact same sperm markers, should be treated exactly the same, whether they're in Detroit or Denver or, uh, uh, Miami, Florida. And so there's, and that's [00:36:00] what having systematized technology does.
We want to, you know, this anecdotal decision making, I can remember when I was in treatment, the doctor was like, Let's try this. And I was like, I don't want to try anything. What does your machine algorithm say is the best predictive stimulating cycle for me as a patient? Um, so again, there's, there's a lot to unpack there, but we are unapologetic, uh, unapologetic that the cost of care must come down.
And the way to do that is to utilize more technology and to make it easier and seamless on the patient.
[00:36:35] Griffin Jones: You're touching on something that I ask every CEO that comes on this program and I probably even talk to you about. It's something that I wrestle with, which is the, the operational needs for expanding access to care and the autonomy of, uh, having, you know, uh, having clinical autonomy.
And because I, I think those things overlap and I, as somebody, as a [00:37:00] business person who wants to see, uh, Access to care expanded like I don't own a clinic and I don't have any shares in any I feel like I could say I would make docs do stuff and that stuff might interfere with the way that they want to practice and recently at Midwest Reproductive Symposium.
There was a talk, so this is public. This isn't me having a private conversation. Uh, I don't want to, uh, say the doctor, so I'll make up a name like Dr. Richard Scott said that these corporately owned networks and business owned networks absolutely Make you practice medicine. And to me, it strikes at what I see as like inseparable things.
Like I would not, uh, if, if I were the owner of a clinic network, I would not let docs do their own ultrasounds. I, because it just, it isn't feasible. I would make them use a certain EMR. I would, uh, you know, there, there's probably a few of those [00:38:00] other types of. of things that they would be doing, you know, they wouldn't be doing IUIs, you know, um, but I'm not a clinician.
I am a D. Biology student, and I think that a lot of the folks running these networks are smarter than I am, but they're also not clinicians. Those tensions, to me, I haven't been able to reconcile. Richard Scott seems to say that they're not. Reconcilable. How do you reconcile them?
[00:38:27] Gina Bartasi: It starts with the REI and being mission oriented.
When, when, first of all, I've, I've told you historically and it's still true today, none of our corporate teammates make clinical decisions. We just don't. We build technology. Let me, let me give you another example of technology we've built. Um, there's all this documentation and in other EMRs the billers have to go in and read the documentation.
In our technology, the documentation picks up the code that you're supposed to be billing the insurance company and everything is automated. But you know, [00:39:00] we want all of our doctors to use the technology. I will tell you today, about 75%, maybe 80 percent now utilize that documentation and that automated code billing.
And some of them, it's harder to get them to adopt the technology. They just, they're accustomed to doing their own documentation. What that means is, is you have to have more billers, more coders to go in there, read the physician's notes, and then bill on their behalf. You, again, this partnership, and it is a partnership between, um, REIs and institutional money, whether that's venture capital or private equity.
And there are differences, and I'm happy to talk about the differences, but there has to be a partnership, and then there has to be patience, right? Because when you come in, we want you to utilize our technology, but you have to educate, educate, educate. Again, it has to do with when you're taking down the cost of care so that more patients can afford treatment, your cycle volume has to go up.
Then the light bulb [00:40:00] goes up. If you walk them through the hows and the whys, you've built the technology, they're They're notating and charting at the middle of the night and you just want to say, our job with technology is to make your job easier, but you have to have a lot of patience to walk the doctors through why you've built the technology and you shouldn't be building any technology.
We have an application team, they're a product team and our product team sits in between our engineers and our technology team and the doctors. There's not any, just so we're clear, there's not any product and technology people who don't take their directives directly from the REIs. And then, I do think, uh, for sure, instead of 35 different REIs having input, they ha they collaborate.
We have a medical advisory board, so when there's a medical decision to be made, It's not 35 different REIs trying to make a different decision about something medical or about a technology build. It's a medical advisory board, and then we have a technology board that decides what new features, because you [00:41:00] do, you have to bring, and then sometimes the doctors want you to build things that the technology team may say, It's not the best interest, but then you work together back and forth and back and forth.
And Dr. Kristin Bendikson leads those. She's our head of clinical, chief clinical officer. So she leads these discussions in conjunction and in partnership with the technical team To ensure that she's got support and collaboration from her peers on the REI side, and then our technology team understands their job is to serve the REI.
They take their orders from Dr. Bendikson, not the other way around, and I think that's fundamentally important. Um, probably unique to Kindbody's culture, and it goes back to being venture backed instead of private equity backed, and there are pros and cons to both.
[00:41:47] Griffin Jones: There are pros and cons to both, but I want to see a venture backed venture succeed because I think what we need is a new kind of model.
I think it's going to be really hard to do that with a private equity model, the type of [00:42:00] innovation and scale. In my view, so I would like to see a venture backed group succeed. Whether it's docs or whether it's other types of staff, you talked about servant leadership. What are specific things you do to lead as a servant?
[00:42:14] Gina Bartasi: You have to show up. As executive chairman, I wasn't, as president, I still went to all of our openings. Uh, but if you really want to be motivated, get in front of your clinicians. I went to our Newport Beach Clinic last week, um, that's an extraordinary team. We have extraordinary, I was in Columbus, Ohio for our opening, like, you know, you're, you're working so hard.
As a corporate executive, like every day, the clinician's job is hard, but our corporate team members, our CFO, our COO, everybody is working really, really hard because what we're doing has never been done before, has never been done before. So we're not like looking at anybody else's playbook going, let's do what they did.
You're like, literally every day you're innovating, and that's what makes it hard. Um. But when you really [00:43:00] want a shot in the arm, return to your patients and return to your clinicians. When I went to Newport Beach, because our extraordinary team there had worked in our mobile clinic for the last year while we were opening our lab, we already had kind babies there.
And you have these grateful patients and they're like, Oh my gosh, thank you for creating Kindbody. I felt so, you know, and so if you want to be, you know, A great leader, return to your why, return to your what motivates you, and these are patients. Listen, my twin boys, it's their, oh, their birthday's tomorrow on the 14th.
They turn 13, you know, and it's just, it's not that hard to go back to that heartache and that vulnerability, and you see the, and these patients are screaming ear to ear. What's different between the patients we serve today and, 13 years ago is, again, it was noticeably diverse in Newport Beach. Like, I have a vision of Newport Beach in the OC and I see white, rich, and heterosexual.
That was not who was at our clinic. Yes, there were heterosexual couples because they [00:44:00] make up the majority of the IDF population. But I think we intentionally serve a very disparate patient population and that is very intentional and that is rewarding. And if you want to be jazzed as a CEO, get in front of your patient and your clinician.
We have a nurse practitioner there, she's the bomb. I'm not going to name all of our superstars because they're too easily headhunted. But she jumped up in front of me and she was like, I love Kindbody. I was in Denver with you, I was in San Francisco with you, and I was in LA with you. And I was like, are you an owner of this business?
Cause you talk like an owner. She was talking about all the sacrifices she made and she was driving back and forth between LA and Long Beach, where she lives. So, we're going to grant equity, uh, disproportionately take care of our superstars like that. So, we have a, an embryologist there who left another private practice to join Kindbody.
Kindbody is the group. We want to ensure that Kindbody remains the group, the employer of choice, that when we come into a market and we run ads for an REI or an [00:45:00] embryologist, that people choose Kindbody as their first place of employment. And she was motivational, and hearing why they chose the, all of these people are highly targeted and, and highly compensated, and they have a choice of where they want to go to work every day, and to hear them talk about how and why they chose Kindbody.
And I got back on the plane, it was a long flight back because I missed my flight to Chicago. I was coming to MRSI, but I missed my flight. And then I took four flights to get back to the East Coast. But anyway, um, I was really jazzed as the leader. You're like, man, okay, every day you're like kicking yourself for the mistakes you make or, you know, but as long as the highs outweigh the lows, you're like, I can do this another day.
We're going to make a difference. So I don't know. I was like coming out of there. I was like, this is good. This is really good.
[00:45:46] Griffin Jones: How about when staff interests and, uh, patients interests aren't aligned? As a leader, you want to align them as much as possible. I remember pressing a doctor about this on the podcast a few years ago and couldn't get him [00:46:00] to say one way or the other if staff matters more than patients, but I was talking to someone also at MRSI, uh, that, uh, had been on the industry side for a while, is now back running a clinic, and said No, I'm seeing a level of demand and a level of expectations from patients that aren't fair and aren't kind.
And I have fired a couple patients in the last few months, and I hadn't really heard somebody say that. Every time I had always heard people talk about firing patients, it was like, oh, it's this one off rare thing. Sounds like this individual has done it a couple times in the last, uh, done it multiple times in the last few months.
And I think that that might be necessary at times. There's times where Um, we, everybody wants everything, right? Like shareholders want the maximum return. Employees want the best benefits, the, the, the best kind of job customers, patients want everything now, and you can't always [00:47:00] align those all the time.
So how do you handle that when those are at odds?
[00:47:05] Gina Bartasi: It's rare we see that a Kindbody, um, you know, we want to be able to treat all patients, we. Um, we don't, we don't turn away patients for diminished ovarian reserve. We don't turn away patients when they've had failed cycles.
[00:47:21] Griffin Jones: It's rare you see patients that drive your staff nuts.
[00:47:24] Gina Bartasi: I think what happens at Kindbody is even when that patient drives the staff crazy, instead of losing your cool, what we would teach is can somebody else message and handhold this patient? Because it could be just a personality misfit. It could be that, it could be a number of triggers. And so instead of firing the patient.
And what we want to be able to do is to say, Hey, my colleague, Sarah can help you through this and do a handoff to another colleague. That is one of the things that we are seeing. This is a learn [00:48:00] lesson, um, the advantage of this kind body network and us all being on the same tech stack and us all having workflow process, you can do exactly what I just said.
So even if you don't have all the staff you need in new, if we go back to Newport beach to say, Hey, Talk to my, uh, financial navigation colleague here or minor, then, then you can easily transfer that patient to another teammate in another market who does have capacity. When you're trying to bring down the cost of care, it's about cost of labor and capacity.
In all of these networks and all of these clinics, they have spare capacity. They have spare capacity with nurses, with MAs, with sonographers, with billing people, with doctors. And so at Kindbody, we say, hey, if you're going to batch this week. We have a physician on mat leave, do you mind to go and cover?
And that's, we didn't build the model like that. The model was like, okay, every clinic is going to start with 15 employees, and we're going to have multiple backups. Like that was in [00:49:00] 2020, 2021. And then as you get closer to the public markets and you get, Closer to now driving on profitable growth, not just growth at all costs.
Now you get smarter about, and by the way, a lot of our teammates want to travel. Like when this young lady in Newport Beach was like, I started with you in Denver, she was smiling ear to ear. She was like, do you know the experience I've had? I mean, our head of the PAs and MPs of clinical, who's a PA herself, she's traveled all over the country and she enjoys it.
So think about, again, if we go back to this brand of Kindbody. And trying to bring down the cost of care and still have profitability to be able to build out new centers is this ability to turn an unhappy patient into a positive patient by saying, Hey, we're having, we're having some miscommunication.
I'm very sorry. Let me let you talk to my friend, Sarah. Being able to use this infrastructure of other teammates who have capacity, I think is pretty unique to Kindbody.
[00:49:56] Griffin Jones: You mentioned the profitable growth and that was one of [00:50:00] the announcements that Kindbody has made that's a big deal for a company that's venture backed.
There's a lot of venture backed companies that grow to be very large and don't ever turn a profit. So what does profitable mean? Does it mean The first month of turning a profit, per annum, at some clinic levels, in some divisions of the company, what does that mean?
[00:50:19] Gina Bartasi: Yeah, no, it's company wide and it's three consecutive months.
Um, we'll see how June looks, but March, April, May, um, so we always message and are prepared for kind of a summer slowdown. I think most clinics see some seasonality in the summer. Um, we will be, we are projecting to be profitable on an annualized basis in 2024, um, but again, we've been investing tens of millions of dollars.
And then that's what we had been talking to our team about. Uh, we had a meeting with all the doctors two years ago. We talked about this magical J curve and you invest, invest, invest, and you come out of it. And then there's this breakeven line, uh, when you break and then you go the J up and to the right.
So [00:51:00] it, you know, it's a point of pride for us. Um, just because everybody now knows, like it's fun. Our team knows about business and finance and they understand the J curve and they under, they're shareholders. So, and so again, there's a fine balance every day. If you return to taking care of the patient and taking care of each other and the team, um, again, the profits are going to come and, and, and we're there now.
Uh, we're going to open a couple of more centers. We'll see. More revenue, we'll see losses with those centers, but some of the other centers are generating, uh, sufficient, not just profit, but cash flow to support those operating losses, so we'll be profitable and cash flow positive by the end of the year.
[00:51:41] Griffin Jones: Might we see parting ways with markets that haven't been able to be profitable?
[00:51:46] Gina Bartasi: That decision is, has not been made yet. I think what we're thinking about doing is how can we make those markets more profitable? Profitable. Uh, we've got two markets that still struggle with profit. [00:52:00] Um, and we talk about that, Griffin, just like any other CEO, I'm positive.
Other CEOs have a portfolio of clinics and they have your outliers, your middle of the road, and then they have some clinics that are struggling. In the venture world, it's a little different. We have a lot longer, uh, more patient capital to continue. Instead of saying, let's close that clinic, we think about how we can leverage internal resources.
To turn that kind of, the capital's a little bit more patient, now there's a lot more risk and there's a lot more reward for venture than there is private equity, uh, but we're not, we're not talking about, you know, closing or moving away from any markets right now.
[00:52:36] Griffin Jones: Do you attribute that to anything other than the J curve, other than the amount of time that it takes for that investment to come to fruition?
This is the profitability that I'm referencing. Or was there other practices that you enacted in the last couple quarters that made that happen?
[00:52:50] Gina Bartasi: Well, for sure, uh, to give you a sense, when we think about profitability, we have 35 clinics, but those are locations, those are satellites and clinics, [00:53:00] um, roughly 32, 32 percent of our total clinics were profitable, only 32%.
86 percent of our clinics were profitable from October to April. It's, it, you know, you just get really, really, um, disciplined about where you're prepared to spend. And you will see us, listen, um, this Sloane Stephens, I keep coming back to it because again, it's a big day for us. We have these ads. They're 30 second spot.
We're going to put them on our own earned media channels, on our social media channels. That doesn't cost us anything. You know, when you said what's changed in profitability, again, let me talk about the capital markets and how that's changed. Um, three years ago, you could raise a lot of money as a venture backed company at a very high valuation, at 10 to 13 times revenue, forward looking revenue.
Those multiples have come down significantly just in the past [00:54:00] two to three years, okay? So the capital markets and how you finance growth changes as well, which means your time to profitability must shorten and you just spend less. So if this were three years ago, you would see Sloane Stephens not only on our Um, our earned media channels and our social media channels and LinkedIn and other places, you would see them running on national networks and on other places, but you just, you just get more rigorous and more disciplined about where you're going to spend money and where you're not going to spend money.
[00:54:30] Griffin Jones: It's long form content, but it's not long enough. There's so many different topics that we could discuss. We could go down more of the technology that you're investing in. We could go down more in how terrifying that J curve is and what that's like to ride that. We could talk about, within the technology scope, more about your EMR, and you were talking about the patient portal benefits to it, but why build an EMR and what that does for you.
There's, there's There's so many [00:55:00] different angles that we could conclude on, but I'm going to let you decide what we conclude on. The floor is yours.
[00:55:08] Gina Bartasi: Yeah. Thank you, Griffin. Uh, I appreciate, uh, to be with you today. Um, congratulations on all of your growth. I think we met, how long have you had IAR, Inside Reproductive Health, IRH?
Four years? Five years?
[00:55:22] Griffin Jones: I started Fertility Bridge many years ago, but IRH, the podcast, started early 2019.
[00:55:29] Gina Bartasi: Yeah, think about that. So, in less than five years, think about how far you've come as well. So, um, my parting thoughts are always to congratulate others who are innovators and pioneers in the industry.
It takes us all. I talked to a new hire candidate today. She said, what you do, Gina, you lead with courage. That was like, tastic, you know, it's just, it's nice to be, because what we're doing is so hard, you're going to be criticized, and the question is what you do with that [00:56:00] criticism, but what you've done, Griffin, to create a platform so that we can collaborate, learn from each other, and Uh, congratulations to you because you've built a pretty phenomenal brand and team in the last five years as well.
Um, certainly I'm grateful for the time with you this afternoon and, and I'm grateful for our extraordinary team at KindBody. So always good to catch up and congratulations again to your growth. It
[00:56:21] Griffin Jones: is, Gina, and I'm sure you'll be back on a fourth time because KindBody is always doing something and, uh, it's a pleasure talking to you.
Thanks for coming back on the program.
[00:56:30] Gina Bartasi: Thanks Griffin
[00:56:30] Sponsor: Thank you for listening to Inside Reproductive Health. This episode was brought to you by Organon. Organon is committed to championing care equity in fertility. By elevating education, expanding resources, and investing in innovative solutions, Organon stands with aspiring parents on their unique journeys.
Learn more at fertilityjourney.com.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to Inside Reproductive Health.