In this episode

Ellie Powers has led innovative product development at tech companies like Google and Slack — and she believes women’s care needs its own upgrade to offer more informative, convenient access to data about their hormones outside of the traditional healthcare walls. In this episode, she covered her journey to Chief Product Officer at Proov, a direct-to-consumer diagnostics company focused on women’s hormonal testing and treatment, and her point of view on convenience and empowerment in preventive care for women.

• For Powers — and many of her colleagues — improving women’s health is personal.
• It’s time for a more data-driven approach to women’s hormones.
• Direct-to-consumer solutions like Proov can help address barriers to care for women.

“A woman now really has the power to see how her body is changing, how her hormonal health is changing, and then decide when she wants to take action.”

– Ellie Powers

Key takeaways

Powers discussed her path to Proov and women’s healthcare technology, and how Proov and other direct-to-consumer healthcare technology helps empower women with knowledge about their own reproductive cycle. Here’s what she covered:

For Powers — and many of her colleagues — improving women’s health is personal.

“I have a hypothesis that of women who work in women’s health or founded women’s health companies…[probably] 50% had a baby through IVF,” said Powers.

Powers explained that her work at Proov is a natural expression of her lifelong interests and her own fertility journey, which are now inspiring new ways to empower women to understand their bodies and take action on their preventive care through Proov’s hormonal testing.

“I was born about five miles away from Google’s headquarters and grew up in Silicon Valley,” Powers said. “My dad worked in tech. Both of my grandpas were electrical engineers. Health tech didn’t exist when I graduated from college, but I wrote my college scholarship essay about how I wanted to use technology to improve human health.” After time at large tech companies and having two children of her own via IVF, Powers said, “My brain just kept going to women’s health.”

It’s time for a more data-driven approach to women’s hormones.

“I’m an elder millennial, so I can measure a hundred different things about my body,” said Powers. “I’m wearing my Oura Ring and my Apple Watch. But for a lot of women’s health, we just go, ‘Shrug, who knows?’”

“If you go on YouTube or TikTok, there are lots of videos joking that you’ll never know if you’re in perimenopause. And I think that’s promoting the idea that women’s health is somehow mysterious and unknowable. We have people predicting the weather and the stock market — those are chaotic systems, but we don’t throw up our hands. There are things we can know about our bodies, and [our goal is] shifting that empowerment from an external force — will I find a doctor? To, here’s something I can do to investigate my body and be empowered with options.”

Powers discusses how Proov is expanding from perimenopause testing to give women more data at different times in their menstrual cycles and throughout their lives to empower their healthcare decisions.

“The same hour hormones that you need to measure for fertility, we’re just measuring them again at specific times in the menstrual cycle. Yes, [changes like perimenopause] can be complicated. But when you combine an app experience that can assess symptoms, assess menstrual cycle changes, and add in the hormonal measurement data multiple times in the menstrual cycle, you can actually have a pretty good idea.”

Powers tells a typical story from Proov customers of experiencing more stress and anxiety than usual but not attributing the changes to perimenopause. With treatment, she said that women often find symptoms going away that they hadn’t even attributed to hormonal changes, such as joint pain.

“A woman now really has the power to see how her body is changing, how her hormonal health is changing, and then decide when she wants to take action,” said Powers. “It really puts that control back on her side.”

Direct-to-consumer solutions like Proov can help address barriers to care for women.

“Women are seeing that they can get a lot of information about their body [by measuring their hormones],” Powers said, and she emphasized that having low-cost, convenient testing and access to treatments can help women make more informed healthcare decisions.

“It used to be that if you wanted to see if you had ovulated, you needed to go and have your blood drawn [at a fertility clinic] to test your progesterone,” Powers said. “If women have repeat miscarriages or trouble getting pregnant, it could be due to a low progesterone issue. That was actually something that happened with my mom.”

Powers said that Proov pioneered the first urine-based progesterone home test to make this testing more accessible without visiting a fertility clinic or provider.

“For less than a hundred dollars, my mom would have been able to identify her infertility issue — at home, in one cycle,” Powers said.

Proov is also connecting women to treatment via telehealth to reduce barriers to care.

“My mom had to go in to multiple doctors, go through multiple miscarriages and blood tests [before her progesterone issue was identified and treated]. Progesterone is very low-risk, it’s a hormone your body produces naturally..if you would like to try a progesterone treatment, you can try it at home. And that’s pretty impressive for a lot of women.”