5HT #133: health consumer’s bill of rights, the best finds at Eudemonia, and 3 more

We tend to lower our standards for healthcare more than any other industry, and no one’s any healthier because of it. 

We all have our examples of how broken the system is. My most recent one: After our commercial insurance plan changed its network midyear (for undisclosed reasons??), my family (including my pregnant wife going to regular OB appointments) was left without updated insurance card info/plan details for an entire month. 😠

I also needed an important echocardiogram follow-up, but (despite having already reached my deductible) my cardiologist’s office said the only way they couldn’t take my new info over the phone or online. I needed to show up in person, with my new insurance card, just so they could check for coverage. Otherwise, I’d likely be charged $700, but of course, I wouldn't know until weeks later. Ridiculous. 🙄

For those who don’t know, the word “patient” comes from Latin for suffering and enduring and filling out the same form a million times (maybe just in my translation). And yep, that tracks very nicely for how most people experience healthcare.  

That experience (or lack thereof) is partly why 1 in 4 insured working-age adults cite “administrative burden” as the reason they delayed or skipped care. Not cost. Paperwork. We’re talking scheduling, billing problems, prior authorization, etc. Doesn’t that sound like a solvable problem? 

I don’t believe we’ve applied our standards to healthcare, and increasingly I think we’ll get to as more health brands turn into consumer health brands. I’ve written extensively about how this is happening with pharma and payers already. Just imagine what happens when every health company has to increasingly compete for our business. 

Because when we stop being patients, we start being customers—and customers have standards. 

To get us going, I created a Health Consumer Bill of Rights. (Pun intended 😉.) Plus, to make this more actionable, one way you can exercise each of these rights—right freakin’ now. The whole thing lives here, but I’m including a preview of the first two below.

Healthcare shall make no law respecting an establishment of jargon, or prohibiting the free exercise of humor; or abridging the right of the people to be spoken to like humans, and to petition for a redress of grievances without a fax machine.

Reasonable follow-ups. A nice waiting room. Instructions a normal person can follow.  Clear communication in a language you understand. And a little personality—Ro’s ads, CrowdHealth’s videos, and even General Medicine TJ Parker’s tweets prove healthcare can talk to us like adults, even make us laugh, without being any less serious about the care. We should expect clinics to compete on patient experience

Exercise your right: Before booking, read the clinic’s Google reviews. They’re the closest thing to a source of truth on experience—and yes, it’s embarrassing how bad most are. Shop around.”

A well-organized Medical Record, being necessary to the health of a free Person, the right of the people to keep and bear their own Data, shall not be infringed.

Are my gut issues connected to my anxiety? Are these night sweats normal? What should I actually be doing at my age with my family history? These used to be questions you’d ask your doctor friends. Now millions are asking ChatGPT/Claude. Imagine how much easier it would be to engage with your health if you could actually see the full picture. Imagine all of this living in your own personal health OS, with all the context on your health to date, so it can flag adverse drug-drug reactions, share patterns across specialties, proactively suggest lab tests or scans your family history suggests are necessary, etc.

Exercise your right: Get your medical records in one place. Ask Muse/Instinct/Duet/whatever to pull records from your providers into one central, cloud-based place your LLMs can pull from. Before connecting anything, review its privacy policy, how it uses your data, and whether you can export or delete it. I plan to share a step-by-step on this in a future edition.

On Tuesday, Counsel Health announced it was being acquired by Oura… for $625M cash! 😳

I spent three months as a fractional Chief Marketing Officer at Counsel last year and helped them hire their marketing leaders, plot their B2B course, and have remained an advisor since. I’ve long believed Counsel Health, under its brilliant CEO Muthu Alagappan (rest of the team is dope, too), was driving the future of AI WITH a “doctor in the loop.”

Their vision for what the best AI-enabled primary care experience for everyone looked like—a doctor that could essentially partner with you for your whole life—was ambitious and exciting and important. And I’m grateful to have had a part in building that story. Now, with Oura, they bring this to many more people, faster and better.

Why did Counsel Health do it? Obviously, their vision was bigger than “just an exit.” They wanted to be the defining, modern primary care solution in the cloud. But in a space with lots of competition and no clear winner, $625M in cash is a pretty tremendous (and lucrative, yeesh) outcome for everyone involved. I totally get why they did it, I’m happy for them (and not mad that I got a few shares along the way, too).

Why did Oura do it? I think Oura pulled its IPO in no small part because it was hard to convince new investors it could grow into healthcare. It’s already a very compelling hardware business, but to get to the valuation they wanted they needed to more credibly make the case for how they’d enter healthcare. Well… here’s your answer now. Major proof points, reach across the whole ecosystem, and the dream team to continue building it. I mean, imagine taking the data from your wearable, having a best-in-class personalized AI, AND be able to bring a doctor in when needed? I think it’s a very smart move for Oura and will get them back on the course to IPO soon.

There aren’t enough meaningful exits these days, and it’s awesome to see a big one like this. Congrats to Muthu and the whole Counsel team. I’m grateful to have played a small 🤏 role, and I’m excited to see what these two companies do together.

I reviewed McKinsey’s Future of Wellness 2027 report so you didn’t have to. And if you’re a CPG brand, I’ve got insights for you.

Turns out, CPG brands are growing faster when oriented around health. In fact, the fastest-growing CPG brands are more than twice ‼️as likely as moderate-growth ones to be built around health and wellness. 

For builders, there’s a massive opportunity to fill gaps and create a want in this space. And I saw this allllll over Eudēmonia last weekend, from Kosterina’s olive oil shots to Veracity’s metabolic health supplements.

This data also spells 🧚 good news for Fixie Dust, my nootropic CPG brand, which will be entering the market at juuuust the right time—when consumers are eager to spend on health-oriented products. 2027 is gonna be an even bigger year for health!

So this happened this week:

For the last year or so, I’ve been driving growth & marketing at Radial—and now I’ve got a swanky title to prove it! 

It’s no secret we have a mental health crisis in this country. Today, most people who seek mental health care are prescribed antidepressants and talk therapy. Those things can be helpful. (Both have been helpful to me.) But for many people, especially those with treatment-resistant depression, they aren’t enough.

Thankfully, over the last decade, we’ve seen a new wave of interventions that target the brain in different ways. I’ve written about the two main ones Radial offers: Spravato and TMS. (Though I’m also hopeful psilocybin and MDMA will get approved and join the list, because the data looks super promising 🤞.) 

Brain medicine is the future, so tremendously more effective than standard treatments (we’re talking 50% of people going into remission!) that I can’t believe everyone hasn’t heard of it. So that’s my ambition—to popularize and destigmatize this space (and, yes, fill a network of 30ish clinics) so we can end depression. And, over the past year, we’ve raised $50M from General Catalyst, acquired 20+ additional clinics, and built a killer team.

Yes, I’m also still actively doing all the other stuff you know and love (5HT, Healthyish Content, Fixie Dust, etc!)—again, I’ve already been doing this job for a year! But I’m grateful for the formal recognition, thankful to great friends John Capecelatro & Elliot Cohen (both co-founders), and excited for the future. Lots more ahead, stay tuned. 😎

I got back on Sunday from Eudēmonia in West Palm Beach, and it was quite a banger!.

There were reportedly 5K–10K people there. I heard Serena Williams even bought a ticket to go! Fitness, supplements, and recovery were all there, of course. But people were asking deeper questions, too. How do we deal with environmental toxins? What should we eat for a healthier brain? What does an un-optimization life look like?

On the brain health side, the talk I can’t stop thinking about was Dr. Robert Lustig’s. I’m a HUGE fanboy of his. Most people wouldn’t care to watch a researcher put up a bunch of neuroscience-heavy slides, but I felt like I was at a rock concert 🤩. He shared his evolving thesis about what’s going on in our bodies, why we’re developing all these illnesses (more in a future 5HT… though, spoiler, it’s sugar + stress). I was just floored by the whole thing.

It wasn’t just the talks, either. Even the expo was awesome! I ran into Tank Sinatra on the floor and introduced myself, thinking I recognized him because I knew him personally. Turns out I just knew him from Instagram 😄. Buuut now we’re buddies, and he’s going to share Fixie Dust, nbd. (That alone might’ve made the trip worth it.)

I also finally got to meet someone I actually do know. Most of you don’t know this, but I have a partner who helps make sure 5HT hits your inbox every week. Her name’s Sonya, she’s amazing, and we met for the first time IRL this weekend! Of course, we got our oral microbiomes checked with Smile House (as one does) and tried ZeroWheel’s mechanized ab wheel (which I loved until I found out it cost $1,000 😬).

Speaking of meeting people, I also gotta mention The Health Innovation Lab, put on by Fitt Insider and Eudēmonia. It’s the best curated group of builders in one space—and having them plus events to attend made the trip extra valuable. (They also doubled as Fixie Dust testers 😏.)

See y’all next year!

3 other healthyish things I’m into right now from Eudemonia:

Most clicked last week: Looks like y’all were into Arrival, a 5g of creatine monohydrate with organic blueberries I recently discovered (and my wife’s a fan of)! 🫐

👋 Who are you again? I’m Derek Flanzraich, and I’m in the business of healthyish. I founded two venture-backed startups–Greatist (👍) and Ness (👎)—and helped dozens of brands you know grow including Ro, GoodRx, Midi, BetterHelp, and LMNT. I now run Healthyish Content, plus a few other healthyish things (like Fixie Dust, launching this fall).

Every Thursday, I share what’s hot, what’s not, and what’s next in consumer health. (Disclosure: I invest in and advise companies in this space—when I cover one, I'll say so.) I sometimes add affiliate links, but they influence my picks zero. Have something to share? Hit reply, I respond to every email.