Healthcare is experiencing a boom in female entrepreneurs. With 85% of females making healthcare buying decisions in the US, it only makes sense to have more women at the forefront of consultancy and decision-making roles. In an episode of The Pulse Podcast, Lauren Howard, digital health strategist, CEO of ElleTwo Consulting and LinkedIn influencer reveals that she quit her day job and joined LinkedIn for networking. “ I didn’t go in trying to build a business, I went in trying to build a network,” she explained. Through her advocacy and posts on LinkedIn, Lauren was able to build a community for other women and her startup consultancy firm ElleTwo.
Launched in 2021, ElleTwo Consulting is a boutique firm specializing in startup advising in the Telehealth, mental health, and digital health spaces. It helps organizations find their market fit and value proposition by zeroing in on their goals, creating operations processes, and streamlining products. ElleTwo is a woman-led consulting organization that utilizes honed soft skills to broach complex technological disciplines and provide complete solutions for our clients. Social media has changed how people used to live, but it has also produced a perfect world, some research indicates that a high use of social media is directly related to this number. According to the National Center for Health Research, 25 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 25 report having a mental illness, with women being the most affected.
In late 2021, she built The High Rise By ElleTwo, a community for female and female-identifying professionals seeking a non-curated version of professional social media. A women’s space with a group of women who will accept you as you are as long as you are authentic, transparent, and genuine. Prior to her consultancy, Lauren worked in mental health and medication-assisted treatment clinics where she implemented new technologies like telehealth and introduced programs that cut the time it took to receive care from weeks to hours. She made the transition from the clinics to SaaS. “A venture capitalist would be looking out for ways to generate money for the company but will cost clinicians their license,” she said. Therefore, bringing clinicians at the top in key decision-making roles is the way forward as business people aren’t talking about outcome-generated things but they are focused on revenue-generated things.