Andrea Ippolito is the founder and CEO of Simplifed, the first independent tele-lactation consulting and nutrition support platform connecting new mothers with resources in the first weeks of becoming a parent. She is currently a Lecturer in the Engineering Management Program at Cornell University. Prior to this, she served as Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs Innovators Network within the VA Innovation Center. There she led the creation of a $10.5M program that provides the tools and resources to VA employees to develop innovations that improve the experience of our Veterans. In 2012, she co-founded health IT company SmartScheduling which was sold to athenahealth in 2016. She has also previously served as the Co-Director of MIT Hacking Medicine. In our interview with Andrea, we learned about her journey to entrepreneurship and how her work with organizations like the VA has impacted her path within healthcare. She emphasized the importance of not just being an entrepreneur, but giving back to the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the process.
Highlights of our conversation include:
- Following the money in healthcare: Healthcare is a constantly changing landscape, with the needs of consumers always shifting. A successful entrepreneur will be able to not only come up with innovative solutions to problems, but they will also know how to recognize a growing problem as it arises. Andrea’s critical advice to budding entrepreneurs is to follow the money to understand the incentives in healthcare. Entrepreneurs need to be willing to collaborate with stakeholders to come up with ideas that are actually relevant and helpful to people’s needs. Recognizing a need and catering your company’s value proposition to that need is critical.
“I always tell folks looking to go into healthcare or the biomedical space to take some time to learn to follow the money. If you can follow the money, then you can actually make changes in healthcare, because you can understand the incentives at play… When you’re an engineer, you’re taught how to look at problems and how to look at the constraints on systems and how to design around those constraints or in collaboration with your user or other stakeholders. It’s really important to have more of that mindset of “there are constraints”, you can’t just blow the whole system up. That doesn’t work.”
- Starting a company in a pandemic: When Andrea launched Simplifed in June 2020, it had been born from a need she recognized in her own experience. Her daughter Mae was born underweight, and Andrea found that she herself wasn’t producing enough breast milk. Andrea saw a need for lactation experts, which was especially important in the pandemic, when even going to see a doctor could pose a risk to a patient. The virtual environment created by the pandemic actually made it significantly easier for Andrea to launch Simplifed. She found investors more open to virtual pitches as well as more likely to recognize the issues that accompany virtual healthcare. Her company also benefited from virtual programs such as Plug and Play, IFundWomen, Women 2.0, and others. All in all, although the pandemic presents its own challenges to entrepreneurs, the new emphasis on telehealth has shed light on issues like those Simplifed is trying to tackle.
“I kept hearing horror stories of new moms during COVID not having access to the support they needed to help them breastfeed… It is your right to have access to lactation support according to the Affordable Care Act… We created a platform to increase access to lactation consultants, especially during COVID.”
- Networking for partners and mentors: Accelerators were an important part of SmartScheduling’s path to launch and acquisition. Through the MIT Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator, Andrea got an introduction to Steward Health Systems. Through another athenahealth accelerator, the More Disruption Please Innovation Challenge, Andrea and her team had to work on a cloud-based solution to solve hospital systems’ issues. This later led to athenahealth’s acquisition of SmartScheduling in 2016. Andrea also emphasized the importance of networking through these accelerators and in all opportunities to find mentors and advisors.
“Mentors and advisors are so important, for the obvious reasons, for making connections to investors, to customers… The way you get access to mentors and advisors is by being part of the ecosystem and by giving back to the ecosystem.”
Interested in women’s health, biomedical engineering, or starting a company in the pandemic? Check out Spotlight on Women in Healthcare Ventures on Spotify and Anchor!
Theia is a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to inspiring and empowering the next generation of women entrepreneurs and investors in healthcare. Visit our website to join our community and access resources that will support your entrepreneurial journey and pursuit of changing healthcare.
Story written by Luiza Perez and Priya Kumar.
