Why Women’s Healthcare Is Still Broken, and How Lori Casselman Is Building the Platform to Fix It

Speaker 1: Welcome to She Built It. I'm your host, Melanie Bar. Building in healthcare requires more than a strong idea. It requires operational discipline, trust, clinical credibility, technology compliance, and a business model that can scale without losing the human experience. Today's guest is building at the intersection of all of it. Lori Castleman is the founder and CEO of June Health, a virtual women's health platform designed to deliver comprehensive expert care across every life stage through one connected experience. June brings together clinical care, mental health support, nutrition, fitness, family and caregiver support, care navigation, prescriptions, and supplements. But what makes the business especially interesting is the infrastructure behind it. A platform model built around personalization, access, expert care, and coordinated support. Lori brings more than 20 years of experience across corporate health strategy, insurance, digital health, and emerging health technologies. She's held leadership roles, giving her a clear view of how health care, employers, benefits, technology, and consumer expectations are changing. She built June Health not only to improve women's care, but to build the smarter, more scalable model for how that care is delivered. Thank you for joining us, Lori. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for AI to improve women's health outcomes and care experiences?

Speaker 2: One of the really key areas for us is optimizing the practitioners and really being able to take this incredible expertise that clinical um practitioners. So, women's health experts like OB/GYN practitioners, nurse practitioners who have done whether it's fertility training, menopause certification. We want to be able to really support those practitioners to be able to see more patients. It's about uh driving efficiency within their work environment, taking all of those administrative tasks sort of off the table for them. So that's one key area for us. Second key area is leveraging the tools that are available to allow our developers to code and build more efficiently and more productively. We have big vision. And there's a lot of innovation happening within our business. There's incredible tools at the disposal of product designers and developers and all really in the spirit of driving better engagement for our members, better utilization, better care, and ultimately better health outcomes. And I just keep thinking for the practitioners, if you have all that data and as a consumer, when you show up, you can get to the heart of health quicker and be much more efficient. Absolutely. There's pattern matching for example in some of the algorithms that we've built into the onboarding process for our members where we ask a series of questions to really understand are they struggling with some of their demographic information etc. And then you can really start to surface

Speaker 1: intuitively leveraging AI. Are you also

Speaker 2: experiencing any of these symptoms because there's patterns that you're able to tap into and I think it serves a couple of really interesting purposes. It helps the member feel like they're not alone first of all and these that they're experiencing as much as they feel very personal and everyone is unique. There's patterns here and probably you may be experiencing some of the following or their women at your stage with this symptom may also feel this type of symptom. And so do you think there's interesting opportunities for us to ensure that the member is feeling heard and then to your point leverage that data to create efficiency in their care journey and in understanding their and matching them to the right practitioner at the right

Speaker 1: time. What is your biggest growth

Speaker 2: challenge right now as you scale June Health and how are you thinking about solving it? Our biggest growth challenge is that we want to do so much. We have a really big vision for the company. There are many different aspects of women's health care and supporting women conveniently and effectively that we want to build and staging and sequencing what we build when and also being somewhat patient with stage that we're at the resources we have at our disposal while still moving as quickly as we possibly can doing as much as we can and driving for that vision of closing the gender health

Speaker 1: equity gap. and you're solving complex problems. So I can see how that growth is not always easy to map moving forward.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not always easy. One of the key things that's underlying many challenges, especially in a business at our stage where we're 3 years in, the talent that you have sort of on your team and around you is is critically important. You have to surround yourself with really smart, really motivated, driven people who are also passionate about the problems that you're solving, who have complimentary skill sets. And the reality is sometimes this talent or team members that are appropriate at a certain stage are not always the same talented team members that are appropriate at your next stage. There's also an element in growing and thinking about those growth challenges and those growth ambitions. It just comes down to okay, who's doing the work and have you surrounded yourself with the right people to lock arms and dig in and do that work together and that iterates. It

Speaker 1: evolves over time. And how are you protecting and building a strong company culture inside a virtual health platform?

Speaker 2: Most leaders need to pause on this one. Culture is everything. I'm a huge believer in if you create a great environment that people want to be part of and allow them to thrive, magic happens. We have a lot of norms and processes within our culture that we stay very true to things like a regular cadence of bringing the team together. It's one hour once a week, but even if you're pulling from people to bring that agenda together and perhaps one week

Speaker 1: you're feeling like the agenda isn't as deep as it is another week, you have to be really committed to just that connection, especially when you're a virtual team, which we are. We have employees all over the country. In many cases, people that have been on our team for a number of years now have never met anyone else in person. those norms and connection points are really important. And then the other thing is surrounding yourself with really talented people and then getting out of their way. For myself as a leader, I think about this a lot, especially given I'm a founder and obviously I care very deeply about the business and many aspects of the business. This is the hardest following this rule has ever been cuz you want to have eyes on and touching everything. But at the same time, you have to flex that trust muscle. It has to be part of your culture. And you have to find great people and let them do what they're great at and what you hired them in the first place to do. And you can't be great at everything. Know your strengths and lean into those strengths and let other people do the same thing. Celebrate the wins. We don't do that enough because everything feels hard. That's a key culture thing, too, is take a moment, whether it's in those weekly meetings or messaging to the team. Even if the wins are small, you need to celebrate them. And it's interesting cuz I think I used to be better at celebrating the wins, but now as things are moving so quickly, thank you for bringing that up because it gets lost even more so today. It's funny, a little personal story here. I saw my brother on the weekend and he was saying, "Wow, you've done so much in the last couple years and you've just hit some key milestones. Are you feeling proud of yourself?" I had to pause for a minute because to a large extent, no, I haven't been taking a beat to feel that pride because I'm constantly thinking about the next thing that we need to do. But it's such an important reminder. Celebrate the journey. And thank you for bringing that up. We used to talk about it a lot on this podcast and you bringing it up made me stop and think we're moving so fast that we're not really doing that so much anymore. And you're right as a founder one of the hardest parts is saying am I the bottleneck? Am I stopping the growth right from moving forward right? It's a hard mirror put up against yourself. But it's also great to check in with your team, especially some of the folks that have been with you for a long time or some of the leaders that you spend sort of the most time with on a day-to-day basis and get that feedback. I mean, the difficult feedback. Am I getting in the way? Am I slowing things down?

Speaker 2: What is one honest lesson about leading people in healthcare in a startup environment that you wish more founders talked about? It goes back to that point I just talked about with sometimes the people that you surrounded yourself with to get you to a certain point are not necessarily the same people that you need to achieve the next set of milestones or objectives. The hard part there is a lot of loyalty and trust that goes into building something together. It can be really hard just that point where it's not working. Too many founders let that drag for reasons that I touched on, right? loyalty, there's experience, there's having been in the trenches together, and it's tough to call that out. But bottom line is when you you know it in your gut and in your heart, you just need to deal with it because everyone around you, right, whether that's your investors, your adviserss, even your clients, everyone around you feels it when you are not dealing with it. as hard as it is, is one of those things where you just have to push yourself to the band-aid off and deal with the problem once in your heart that change needs to happen.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And trusting your instincts. Exactly. Exactly. What lights you up the most about what you do and makes you excited to continue building June Health every day?

Speaker 2: I feel like we're doing something really important. We hear it from our practitioners and our members. I've been fortunate that throughout my entire career, I've worked in healthcare and insurance my whole career. I've worked in a space where I feel like work that you're doing, as much as it may seem somewhat removed on a day-to-day basis. Heart of the why is improving people's lives, that is the heart of our why at June Health. And we believe and we see it every day that we are impacting women's lives. and big ambitious goal is to make a dent in closing that gender health equity gap. That lights me up and I see that we're hitting milestones and adding incredible new people to our team and we're expanding these care journeys, meaning we can touch more lives and solve more health challenges for women. That's very fulfilling. Those are the things I think about on the long walks at the end of a very stressful day. It's that member testimonial or that story you heard from a practitioner where even if there were a few tough ones in any particular day and challenges that you're needing to solve. You have to anchor to some of those positives to know that you are making a difference and that definitely lights me up. I feel passionate about the work that we do.

Speaker 1: And it's great that not only can you love building the business but have the passion and the mission behind it.

Speaker 2: Exactly. I work with an incredible team. That lights me up too when you see someone else getting as excited about your vision for the business that you'd been thinking about for many many years and they're now on that journey with you building and they're as excited about that vision now as you were many years ago. That's super fulfilling and exciting too. I love those moments where we have a conversation sometimes even with our investors or advisors where our clients and our clients are often companies. We sell June as an employee benefit as well into companies. And when you get on those calls and they're just as excited about what you're building

Speaker 1: and the impact it could have as you are,

Speaker 2: that's super fulfilling. So true. And

Speaker 1: I've loved building a global team and I love it when my team challenges me and says, "Hey, have you thought about this?" and surrounding yourself with innovative people has been so much fun.

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. It's tell me something I don't know. How would you think about this? And ideally, it's very differently than how you think about it. And then that combination of different perspectives just elevates the solution that you're building. And it

Speaker 1: took a while for me to think, I want this. I want someone to challenge me. I want someone to come to me with innovative ideas. Yes. All the time.

Speaker 2: Especially how fast we're moving. Yeah,

Speaker 1: absolutely. One of my principles of leadership is if I don't know, I can't fix it. I really do ultimately encourage people around me and the people that I'm working with to find a moment or a constructive way or a channel to share feedback about what's happening in the organization on their team with me so that we're eyes wide open and it just be data point that we can work to solve

Speaker 2: for. So true. I have a potential client that I might be working with and I keep sharing information with her whether she becomes a client or not. I want her to know the information because I as a leader would want to know that information. Yeah. Sometimes those can be tough conversations whether you're on the delivering end or receiving end. But ultimately it's all in the spirit of evolving and improving. What is one way that you protect and cultivate your joy with your work and your life today?

Speaker 1: Ultimately, I'm probably not doing it as well as I would like to in this early 0ero to one stage. But for me, it's all about family and relationships, spending time with my kids and my husband, getting outside. I try and protect at least 45 minutes to an hour a day to hike or be outside, even if it's just walking the dog and taking him on a little extra walk. My dad taught me really early on in my life when you're going through a stressful time, go back to the basics, which is chop wood, carry water philosophy. Sometimes you just need to get out and garden or do some sort of hard work and turn your brain off a little bit and turn on the physical side. That definitely can bring me joy as well. And the last thing is traveling. We travel as a family quite a bit and I definitely love seeing new places and expanding our horizons.

Speaker 2: It's amazing the perspective that you have when you get outside and then having a dog is great because it forces you to get out and take those moments even when you might not decide to do it. It's a calming thing to just spend time with an animal and like slow down and walk a dog and sometimes you need that at the end of a very busy day. Yeah. Thank you so much for everything you're doing to improve women's health. Can you please share with us how and where we can find you?

Speaker 1: We are June Health. You can find us on Instagram, LinkedIn. Our website is www.junehealth.care. Connect with us on LinkedIn. be really happy to hear from anyone.