Technology is revolutionizing healthcare, providing innovative ways to enhance patient care and streamline services. Digital tools like telemedicine and health platforms enable better access to information and personalized care. How can we use these advancements to build a more patient-focused healthcare system?
In this episode, I have Whitney Isola, a registered dietitian and Co-Founder of Aqua Power. Whitney shares her journey from co-founding a healthcare startup to creating the review platform. She discusses the challenges of working in the healthcare industry and how to leverage technology and patient empowerment to improve care. Don’t miss this insightful conversation—tune in now!
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Transforming Healthcare with Tech and Care with Whitney Isola
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of my big concerns, and I think a big concern of a lot of people, is what we’re using our technology for. We’ve seen a recent advancement in technology and we’re seeing ongoing discussions about things like AI, machine learning, all these other things, and the question is what are we doing with it and I think we’ve seen a lot of cases where some of our technological advancements were used for purposes that did not necessarily have the best outcome on human health, human mental health, etc. I have in my head a list of the types of things that really are a good use of this technology because technology can do a lot of powerful things and my guest today, Whitney Isola, has some experience using our technology for some of these purposes that seem like they actually have the potential to improve the human experience as opposed to just bombard you with advertisements, like a lot of them try to do. So, Whitney is a registered dietitian as well as the cofounder of OncoPower, now the chief of staff at ArcherReview.
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Whitney. welcome to the program.
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I’m excited.
I’m excited too because this is a great thing to talk about. Now, let’s first start with your story because you’ve done a lot of different things, like where did it all begin? Have you always wanted to find innovative solutions for these human problems? Is this something that you’ve always been kind of interested in doing?
Yes, there’s some sort of natural curiosities and problem solver that live within me. I will say I don’t think I can fully take credit for ever being like the visionary or the idea person, I’m definitely a little bit more of practical thinker and like kind of roadmap best course to get us there but I don’t always have that end state vision but I’m very good at listening to the on-the-ground feedback early and often so I would say that type of critical thinking and product planning is a little bit more of my wheelhouse and expertise. But, yeah, I mean, that said, I think I’ve always had this little bit of hunger for building something that didn’t exist before. I went into college and higher education kind of wanting a very traditional career in healthcare and realized about three-quarters in taking some business classes that I could think more broadly, almost a little too late or it felt too late education wise to make a change. I kind of had that more traditional early career experience in terms of working in a community hospital setting, multidisciplinary medical practice setting, and then health major, New York City health system setting, I kind of always kept the door open to taking on projects or ideas or working with people in terms of executing something new or creating something out of nothing. My first job outside of the hospital, so I guess my second job ever, was with a multidisciplinary medical practice where they didn’t have a dietitian and I pitched them that, “Hey, you have 22 providers but you don’t have one dietician, let’s add those services for your patient population,” even just in those little morsels early on, I kind of had that within me.
And then in these morsels early on, was there anything, any particular experiences that gave you the indication that, as you were saying at the beginning, that you’re not necessarily the visionary idea person, you’re more the one that builds the idea?
There was a certain comfort in being able to have more control over what that looked like. Maybe for others, the more control is like having an idea and slinging it and getting it out there and doing it all themselves, but for me, the locus of control was in taking on things that were adjacent to my experiences but still new and fresh and challenging in different ways and kind of building and learning from there so it was probably a longer path to entrepreneurship, somebody who might have just gotten out there and done that. I mean, from the time that I started taking on projects like that to the time that I cofounded OncoPower was probably a six- or eight-year gap, and then from the time of feeling confident enough in OncoPower to move on to my next thing was probably another six or so years. So, yeah, I don’t know if that kind of helps answer anything but I think that, for me, yes, there’s like a little bit of the risk taking and the blind confidence, like why did you think you were capable of that? Like there’s a little bit of looking back and being like, “I’m glad I was so naïve,” because was that a smart decision? Maybe not. But did it get me to where I wanted to be career wise? Yeah, it did.
And we all got to make different types of decisions and there’s no one path, right? So people even think commonly that there’s this idea of the overnight success but behind the overnight success is however many thousand hours of learning, developing, working, determining what you’re curious about, even trying something and then failing at it before you come up with a formula that works.
Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think back to even just working extra projects or ideas or consulting things here and there in to every crevice of the day. Like now I would not necessarily wake up at 4:30 in the morning to make sure that I get two hours in before I’d go on with the rest of my day. But for years, I could, and so that’s kind of the unspoken grind. It’s not that sexy. It’s like the story that somebody kind of makes it is always nicer.
And anyone out there listening who’s currently in that unspoken grind or thinking about getting into that unspoken grind, and I think the most common scenario is you have a full-time job that keeps you paid, keeps the lights on, but you’re also trying to find time here and there to follow your passions. What do you say to those people as they kind of go through it to keep people going?
Ah, that’s such a good question. First and foremost, you have to be committed to what you’re building and what your vision is or who you’re helping or the community that you’re helping enough that if you completely fail, you still feel really good about the work and the learnings. Because there have been so many things, ideas, projects, etc., adventures that I’ve been a part of that have not done well, but at the end of the day, there was no – there wasn’t a negative feeling tied to it, there were either great connections or great people or great products or a lot of learning about how to communicate with a type of customer. So, none of it felt like it was for nothing.
So I think when you have a little bit of that big picture baked into what you’re doing, even the failings can feel fruitful. Share on XIt’s not always easy but you kind of just have to blindly trust that you’re going to end up on the other side and you’ll, at the very least, have gained something really valuable for yourself.
And is that what you took into starting OncoPower?
Yeah, certainly. I mean, prior to OncoPower, I had a project that I worked on, a grocery retailing recommendation engine for more automated, healthier recommendations based on nutrition profile. Of course, this was eight or ten years before Instacart and online grocery shopping so it’s kind of funny, we ended up – here I was a dietitian working in a medical practice and I wasn’t some VP at a health insurance company or things like that and I’m making phone calls to H-E-B and Kroger and they’re taking meetings and it’s like this very funny impostor syndrome where you’re like, “Why are these people even answering my phone calls? I am nobody here.” The margins were too thin, the business itself was not fruitful or worthwhile, but there was – that was one of my first doses of like, oh my god, if you just do it, sometimes people answer the phone on the other end and you can get some meetings. So that’s what I mean when I say there were certainly project failings well before anything started to take off but each one kind of gave me a little bit more confidence or a little bit more ability to put myself out there.
And would you say overcoming this impostor syndrome that a lot of people suffer from is an important part of whatever you need to build in yourself in order to be able to have one of your ideas succeed?
I do think so, yeah. I mean, especially if you refer to it as impostor syndrome. I will say a part of me hopes that I also never get over it in the sense that I hope to never have an ego where I’m like, “Well, they should clearly be taking my phone calls.”
Oh, yeah, there’s a lot of people like that.
I agree, I think you do need to kind of get to a level of confidence where you’re like, “Okay, I can walk into the room and I can just hit go on selling this idea or this vision,” but, at the same time, like not too much confidence.
Yeah, the right amount, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I’ve even heard some people argue that, in the end, it’s about confidence and people who exude too much confidence that comes off as arrogance and oftentimes are actually masking a lack of confidence and that’s just like one of the ways that they mask it and when they cope with it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes so much sense. I could totally see that.
It sounds like health and health-related outcomes is something that you kind of were interested in right from the get go. Is there a personal experience that you had that made you want to impact the world in this type of fashion?
No, that’s a good question. I was always kind of curious about healthcare and all through high school had volunteered in hospital setting. And, quite frankly, one summer, I got put at the Healthy Living Center, which was like this glorified gym for the elderly and people rehabbing with an OT, occupational therapy, physical therapy, nutrition, and I was like the dietitian that was there, just was the most chipper, happy person, like seemed to really love their job, and, quite frankly, I knew I wanted to study something in healthcare and I was like, oh, she’s the happiest person I’ve ever encountered in any of my healthcare settings and she talks about food all day, like what could go wrong with the career where you just talk about food? So that was my very mature 17-year-old approach, picking what I’m going to apply to college for.
But I think there’s a really important lesson in all that, because, really, if you think about it, if you’re looking around the world and you’re looking at the people that you meet, you’re more likely to be influential to someone if you come across as being happy. And we see a lot of grumpy people out there trying to tell you that you should be like them and usually you’re going to be like, “No thanks.”
Yeah, that’s true, just like that kind of instant energy and joy, like people read it and you can’t fool people about that type of thing.
Yeah. So when you encounter these leaders that are too arrogant or these people that are too arrogant, as you were saying before, do you see them as exuding genuine joy the way you experienced with this nutritionist when you were 17 or do you feel like you’re seeing through a mask?
I’m very much the person that’s like it doesn’t really bother me when other people are miserable or unhappy. Obviously, there’s not a lot of joy in having those experiences or dealing with people that are like that, but I usually kind of leave the interaction and I’m like there’s clearly something way worse going on in their lives. So it doesn’t get under my skin, but, yes, you can kind of see the unhappiness, or at least sense that there’s something bigger going on and that if somebody really has to behave that way, then there’s other parts of their life that are not going well, yeah.
Well, congratulations on finding a way to not get absorbed with that energy. I know that’s something that I’ve personally struggled with and see a lot of other people struggle with too where someone that’s unhappy, they’ll often do something like project their own unhappiness onto you or on to whoever they’re talking to and sometimes it can rub a lot of people the wrong way. So, do you have any secrets as to how to prevent that from happening?
Man, I mean, to be perfectly frank, this could probably turn into a therapy section. There’s probably deep-seated reasons I’m very okay being around conflict, just coming from a divorced household and stuff like that. Yeah, like doing the back and forth gave me all of my adult diplomacy skills, negotiating parents, etc., so there was probably a little bit of like baked-in navigating childhood that kind of naturally has extended itself into adulthood for me, that is the reason that I am unbothered by those things so I don’t – it’s not a path I would recommend for other people in terms of learning how.
So, you’re not about to go up to some five-year-old and be like, “Maybe you can cause a conflict with your parents so you’ll learn how to deal with it, and then when you’re up, you’ll be good at it.”
Yeah, no. There’s too many unknowns and tangibles.
So when you study nutrition, is that something that made you happy when you were studying it and is that something that you felt the impact of the entire time?
I really enjoyed being a dietitian and all of my schooling as it related to nutrition, my peers, my classmates, and I think there’s a lot of really interesting stuff going on in that field. It’s such a shame that nutrition is kind of like this, I always refer to it as the redheaded stepchild of healthcare because it’s like so poorly reimbursed, the models are so catered to – the reimbursement models are so catered to acute care and sick care as opposed to wellness care. It was, unfortunately, very disheartening once I was in the field and kind of starting to make more business-related decisions within healthcare, like just seeing how a lot of that played out and how there was not as much control for the RD to have in the care journey for the patient as they would have liked, especially relative to other medical disciplines. But that said, I find the subject matter really interesting. I think there’s a lot of compelling research that continues to come out, especially with regards to brain-gut connection and things like that. I enjoy it but, unfortunately, there’s a little bit of a ceiling of success there and so I’ve just kind of naturally started to navigate career wise away from that.
So, with some of these, I guess, healthcare priorities, and I think a lot of us have heard the whole phrase about how at least in, quote unquote, current Western medicine, the priority is always buy your health back as opposed to the preventative stuff. Now also, we’re seeing some of these uses of technology. Technology has the potential to – your Apple Watch could monitor your heart rate, monitor some heart rate variability. I’ve even heard some rumblings about the idea of your toilet detecting your cancer based on measuring your urine every single day. Do you see any potential in this technology use kind of helping us become less reactive and more proactive in how we handle our health?
Yeah, no, I mean, I think what you mentioned are really good examples. I mean, if you had kind of told physicians, I don’t know, 40 years ago that they would potentially be able to tap into this world of personal fitness data on their patients, which doesn’t largely get used overarchingly in the health system but just like the concept of that alone, I don’t think people would have really believed it. And so particularly when you introduce the idea of gamifying healthcare a little bit, like I think people use their Apple watches to compete against themselves even or to track, like, yeah, we’re both holding up our wrists. I try to do the streaks and make sure that I’m closing all my rings every day and things like that. And so even though I’m just gamifying that against myself, there’s a lot of power in that and I think that we’re starting to also really see that open up the world of mental health, which is really interesting. There’s a lot of much more asynchronous, on-the-go, check-in style, there’s greater anonymity, but there’s validated resources that people can lean on in terms of whether it’s meditations or through talk therapy or things like that. So I think it’s really interesting to see all of that and it’s giving a lot more control back to the patient, because healthcare was always this very paternalistic experience, like you went to the doctor and the doctor told you what your status was and what you needed to do. And so now I think that there’s greater autonomy over that experience, which is really powerful for someone.
Yeah, that’s an aspect of it that I wasn’t thinking about as much. I was thinking about the idea of being more proactive rather than reactive, which nutrition is kind of at the heart of it, how are you eating every day as opposed to, “I just got sick and get me the pills,” but also the individual autonomy about it, because I know 50 years ago, 30 years ago even, it’s like whatever the doctor says goes but now, people are more being given options or even researching themselves options of here’s how I treat, and both with respect to physical and mental health, for that matter.
Yeah, it’ll be really interesting to see what kind of crops out from this chapter of more autonomous and interactive and device-driven stage of healthcare that we’re in in terms of some of those verifiably enhanced screening processes and things like that. I almost think what you’re thinking is the next step, because we need to amass patterns of information and data and how are people using these tools and what’s reliable. I know that there’s already some really compelling data, like you were saying with the Apple Watch and heart rate changes and things like that. I’m sure there’s a lot more to come, which will be really interesting to see shake out.
Well, I’m just always thrilled to see people trying to leverage this technology for something that I think matters more to the human experience than, say, Amazon getting you your package in two hours when you could have just waited a day and been fine with your life.
Yeah, that’s fair. That’s very fair.
Now, after selling out of OncoPower, you said you had to take your career into a somewhat different direction, partially because of this being the redheaded stepchild or being the afterthought and seen as the luxury of the healthcare community.
Right, right, right. One of my cofounders from OncoPower, he runs this company, ArcherReview. ArcherReview is an education technology platform that is preparing the next generation of nurses and medical professionals for their boards. He’s taken a very kind of heart-led approach to nursing education. It’s very authentic and not spending a dime on marketing costs for years and years. The student community kind of picked up on that and has gravitated towards that and so, over the past two to three years, the company has just really taken off. And so with our working together with OncoPower and just knowing each other really well and having that really – that trusting relationship of having been through the roadmap of building something together before, he said to me, “You gotta come help me manage this growth and make sure we’re doing this and operationalizing this well.” And so it’s been really, really fun, I have to say. I never in a million years would have guessed that my career would take a turn into more education, but it’s some of the most rewarding work that I’ve been doing in my career and I think part of that is just the enthusiasm for supporting the next generation of healthcare professionals, like healthcare is going through this really interesting shift where we’re having staffing shortages across the board, there’s incredible rates of burnout. It’s not easy emotionally to be a healthcare provider anymore. You’re so overburdened with documentation and admin and compliance-type tasks and activities that kind of sucks away from the true joy of delivering care to a patient or to a client. And so I think just trying to prepare people better for the workforce and then support them even further for leveling up their credentials and advancing their practice has been really just so much fun.
So at ArcherReview, do you work with people who are already educated in the healthcare fields that need to kind of level up? Do you work with people who just want to get into as a nurse practitioner? Who do you work with and what do you bring to those people?
Yeah, we do a little bit of everything. So we have an offering for pre-nursing students to pass exams that they need to pass to get into nursing school. We have a nursing school companion product that we recently launched. Again, these educators are getting so stretched and the programs are trying to accept as many students as they can but are sometimes underresourced for delivering the care and so we kind of designed 20 courses that mirror the coursework that the programs are delivering and just help really support the students in terms of giving them practice questions and case studies and on-demand lectures and we have a really interactive learning portal that helps people really hone in. The analytics are kind of incredible because it’s like traditional learning, you might know that you’re weak in one practice area, but what we offer to the students is really being able to dig in and see, okay, so you’re getting this topic area in the integumentary system wrong 80 percent of the time and so if you can shore up your knowledge with watching this 10-minute video on this one system, that will help put you over the bar in terms of making it all come together. And then we have an NCLEX board exam prep product. We have products for nurse practitioners a few years into nursing when people are starting to think about if they want to become advanced practice professionals. And, actually, later this year, we’ll be launching some additional certifications. A lot more to come in terms of supporting continuing professional education and specialty certifications.
And when it comes to the impact that you’re having or how you’re feeling the impact, how does the impact that you were having with OncoPower compare to the impact that you’re now having with ArcherReview?
That’s interesting. So, in OncoPower, it was a supportive care platform for oncology patients so when I say supportive care, I mean all of the areas that don’t get navigated well in office in visit. So we had created, for example, like a daily check-in tool that was a pretty quick physical and emotional check-in. People would use it to not only track how much better things were going for them than they realize, because it’s very easy to not recognize the little wins when you’re on the care journey. There was a journaling prompt at the end and people could either save it for themselves or share it with the community. And we saw so much emotional support, this like really strong community of people just being really vulnerable and transparent so that was such a cool way to see how a tool, as you’re saying, like a tool that we built using technology was making this difference in how people saw their day and their lives day in and day out, but it was much more individualized. I would say that the impact – we had grown the community to about 6,000 patients, which, for healthcare, is actually a very challenging task and it felt like you really had a sense of who was on the other side of the computer and who could support – people were very candid and honest about their medications and their second opinions and things like that and we had built an engine for trying to better screen for clinical trials that people might be eligible for and things like that. So that was very rewarding but almost in a much more individualized way. With ArcherReview, we have this – and we do have the B2B offerings, we are supporting the educational institutions and whatnot, but we have this immensely enthusiastic B2C user base, educated over a half a million nurses at this point and just seeing the enthusiasm, the testimonials that are like, “I used other products and I failed the test three times and I just felt like nobody believed in me anymore and then I found you guys and you were able to help me get across the finish line and now I feel like I can lift up my family, I can” – like this is livelihoods for a lot of people and so it’s very cool but it’s almost like a much more en masse experience for me, I would say.
And so now with ArcherReview, you’re in the process of scaling up a business. What does that feel like, because it’s like a little bit different experience and building it from scratch than to come in and to get from one level to where it needs to go to have a bigger impact.
You could see I light it up with you saying that. It’s just been so fun. There’s a lot of problem solving in that and resource planning in that that I just find to be a very fun process.
It’s almost like one of those things where you don’t need to be the person that has all the answers, but you do need to be the person asking a lot of the right questions. Share on XAnd so what I’ve found is that I’ve kind of gotten in, gotten to really know the business and know the critical players, and then I probably took the first six or eight months to really evaluate right person, right seat, because there’s so many talented people but when things are shifting so rapidly, you do need to find a little niche that they can really hold on to and make their own and thrive within. I mean, we’re still growing very rapidly but some of that core team is a little bit more settled, which is nice, and now it’s a lot of resource planning in terms of little things, but like are we using the right tools for the team for project management, for file management, for example, like digital assets, like we have this huge amount of medical illustrations that are developed in house so how do we leverage tagging those appropriately and using them across all of the products appropriately for brand consistency and things like that. So it’s just fun. I kind of never know exactly what the next problem will be or what the next piece of the business is that we need to tackle but, slowly but surely, every decision that gets made feels really tangible because all of a sudden you’re helping this team of – right now we have 11 employees and 60 contractors.
Now, if someone is thinking about joining a business that’s in the process of or about to undergo a process of this type of rapid expansion, what should someone be thinking about? What makes someone a good fit for joining an organization like that?
Number one, you got to be flexible and okay with the unknown. You’re not going to get a perfect JD that has exactly which tasks you’re going to be doing week in, week out so there has to be a little comfort level with growth and the unknown. A little bit of hunger for asking about that and trying to help get the company there. I think the last kind of tenet is efficiency, like it’s very noticeable the efficient producers and the people that can dig in and produce quality work under pressure versus not. And so I think just being realistic about your own skill set with regards to that is probably helpful.
And then anyone out there scaling a business, what are some basic, high-level do’s and don’ts and are there any don’ts that you’ve experienced in scaling this business that you convey to anyone?
The biggest thing is just making decisions. It’s so funny when I was little, my dad used to say, “Good decisions, bad decisions, at least you’re making decisions,” and that sounded like such bad advice to a kid, because I’d be like, “What? You don’t wanna make a bad decision,”
but sometimes I think that inaction is worse than making a bad decision Share on Xif that makes sense and so I think especially when these high-growth, faster paced stages, you have to be okay with making a decision with maybe 70 percent of the information that you would like to have to make it, then going ahead and making the call on that was the bad decision and we need a course correct right now and we need to do that sooner rather than later. I think the fear of the perfect decision is probably the worst thing that can happen.
And then, as a leader of a business, whether a cofounder or chief of staff, is there something you need to do to foster a culture of people in the organization feeling more comfortable making that bad decision as opposed to – I fear a lot of people feel in every business setting that making a bad decision is going to result in a consequence and that can result in toiling over it for way longer, exactly what you just said.
Yeah, no, you’re right. I mean, you have to also communicate that, right? So you have to be transparent with your team. I think we do a good job of not building a culture of fear. It’s a very supportive, celebrate the wins team, but you’re right, sometimes people do need that reassurance that, “Hey, it’s okay.” We are moving fast and furious, we are making a lot of decisions, we are getting a lot of products to market, we’re making sure that they meet certain standards and brand quality and planning them in such a way that they’re really thoughtful for the end user and so, yeah, I mean, I think you just have to kind of overcommunicate that, probably.
My opinion about our education system is that it kind of teaches us, like, “Well, if you fail, that’s like the worst thing that could possibly happen,” so we kind of have this like 17 years of, “Well, don’t get the wrong answer,” right?
Yeah, yeah –
– as a test and so, as a result, we’re kind of conditioned that way and I’m sure there’s plenty of people in the workforce, I’m sure you’ve encountered plenty of people that still act that, like, “Well, you better be right.”
Right. I will add to that, now that you’re saying this, it kind of brings up for me, I think it’s also just important to give people autonomy in the workplace early on. I mean, there’s a lot of things and I can even see it now where people would be like, “Oh, do you need to be on that meeting to make that decision and stuff?” and I’m like, “No, no, no. You guys go. You do it. I trust your judgment.”
Is part of it understanding that maybe someone might even be thinking about things differently because you’re on the call, acting differently than if you were not on the call, if you just said, “Hey, handle it. Just talk to this person, I’m sure you’ll make the right choice, I’m sure you’ll figure out what you need to do.”
Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I guess you do want to kind of probably model the behavior. There’s certainly a lot of, I don’t know, I guess you could call it train the trainer and stuff like that where you want to spend some time really supporting somebody early on, but then I think also there’s an element of saying, “Hey, I’ll be on for this one but I’m gonna be quiet. I want you driving it. I want you asking the questions. We can touch base in private after.” The mentality of praising more in public and if you do have more critical feedback, doing that more one on one I think helps support somebody’s growth in such a way that they’re learning and they’re not feeling nitpicked.
Yeah, for sure, and I’m not going to ask you to name any names on this podcast or anything like that but other people within your business or within the healthcare industry in general that you feel personally you were able to kind of help build their successes, build their career.
I can think of people that did that for me in my career that pulled me along and that I just trusted to give me real feedback but constructive feedback, that I trusted to let me run with something, maybe on the early end of ready and learn and get support. And then I can also think of people that I have now had the privilege to be able to kind of pay that forward. And, yeah, it’s a very gratifying part of working professional, and I guess, particularly a working female. I mean, I certainly work in a female-heavy industry, like healthcare, and then, obviously, a lot of our core products at Archer are nursing focused, which is female dominated. My RD background, female dominated. So there’s just a really nice sisterhood to all of that that I’ve been lucky enough to experience.
And in your organization, when you’re kind of building people and building teams, have you ever encountered any challenges around gender expectations or anything like that?
Yeah. I mean, yes, actually was my answer. Got hit in the face with a memory, right?
Oh, yeah.
No, no, I’m just kidding. Working in a major health system setting and going out on maternity leave and then coming back, just facing some of the dynamics of that was really fascinating and eye opening, because I feel like, for the most part, I’ve been very fortunate to have very supportive leaders, but it’s interesting the way that those things can ripple out, particularly with some sort of absence and then return to work, so that, I don’t know, for whatever that comment is worth, like, yes, I’ve certainly seen some of that. No, it hasn’t been a huge part of my career, thankfully. Those things exist and they’re worth paying attention to in the workplace.
So in the healthcare industry, do women face any of the similar or many of the similar challenges that we’d encounter in, say, something like tech?
Yeah, no, I think that that’s a fair statement. I think a lot of industries truly, even though there’s a lot of really good work being done in terms of gender equality, and, yes, there’s certain traditional industries where you see that emerge a little bit more than in others. I think, in general, there’s a lot of the same problems that might exist in tech, exist in healthcare, exist in engineering. At the same time, people are becoming more aware and I think that even just being a little bit more vocal or feeling like you have team members that you can rely on or lean on is always a good thing.
And then you talked about the shortage of workers in the healthcare industry that we’re experiencing right now. How do you see that playing out over the next several years with your organization, with any other organization as well as just people’s general awareness that this is an area of human need that’s only going to increase?
I mean, there’s so many different ways that I could answer this question. I mean, first and foremost, we’re going to see this huge shift to more advanced practice professionals delivering primary care. We’re already seeing that, but I think that that trend will continue, because there’s simply not enough providers and a lot of the providers become hyperspecialized. I think we do need to do something in terms of not financially incentivizing hyperspecialized practice providers just so that there can be more general care options available, but we will see more elevation for PAs, for NPs, so some of those other advanced practice professionals. In terms of how we see that play out as like a technology company that’s employing healthcare workers, I mean, we very much understand how desirable using clinical knowledge for different types of work and getting to have a little bit of a different work-life balance and what that translates to in terms of not having to work nights and things like that, doing shift work, I will just say that we take very seriously the idea of bringing somebody onto the team and supporting their livelihood and supporting their family and the tentacles of what that means in terms of leaving clinical practice because you start to leave some of those clinical practice opportunities behind if you’re not in clinical practice anymore, and so just as a company and as an employer, we feel this responsibility to only hire if we know for sure that there is a very long runway for that role, like we can commit to that person and that family indefinitely, and so I hope that a lot of other companies kind of like understand that, don’t kind of play things fast and loose with healthcare workers that are leaving the bedside because it is important to kind of make that decision. But, yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I think also there’s kind of some interesting stuff playing out in terms of international nursing trends and hiring and visas and etc. and that still there’s a lot to be played out there but I think also we’ll see a lot more immigration happening around healthcare professions, even more than before.
Well, I mean, one of the things that I’m hoping that this is kind of one of the manifestations of is that we’re getting out of the work culture of like burn them out and the work culture of like, okay, longer term, people need something that’s sustainable, we don’t need to like work someone, work so hard that after three years, you see them –
Chew them up and spit them out.
Yeah, exactly.
It’s such a beast, to think it through. You have these forces of some patient-to-provider ratios being encoded into legislation. You have these health insurance companies that are making bonkers money that are not incentivizing or reimbursing properly for certain episodes of care, and like I was saying before, just the admin and the documentation. If you didn’t document it, it didn’t happen. I’ve seen advanced directives very clearly stated and the medical team be afraid to enact those because there’s one part of the form that was filled out incorrectly and what could that mean for the hospital system and it’s such a shame when you see all of these various problems play out in healthcare.
Oh my gosh, yeah. It sounds like a huge challenge.
Also, I’ll step off my soapbox now.
I think we have too much paperwork everywhere in our entire economy and life but I will also leave that for another episode. Thank you so much for hopping on Action’s Antidotes, telling us a bit about your story, about being able to kind of take some of your passions, first of all, be curious enough to observe, “Okay, here’s someone that’s happy, this is why I wanna be passionate,” find ways to use our technology for something that matters to the human experience, and then kind of pivot it in a few different ways, on a few different scales, from the actual healthcare itself to educating the people that are going to be addressing our health needs.
I think that curiosity and just a little healthy dose of not totally understanding the consequences of where I was going and the decisions I was making and having this belief that if I could just be part of it and be helping to do something about it, there’s something on the other side of this. And so I think my career has kind of unfolded. I’ve always been trying to think three years out, five years out, what are the things that are important to me that I want to have autonomy over or that I want to be kind of like leaning into, but I’ve never road mapped my career in such a way that I knew for sure that I needed to be doing X or Y, but I have to say I’ve always been very diligent about saying what tools do I need in the toolbox, and being unafraid to set up an informational interview with somebody that I admired that I thought was doing really compelling work and say, “What did you learn along the way? What was the most important – what are the experiences? What professional organizations have you found valuable? What do you read in the morning? What’s your go-to journal or newsletter?” those types of things. So I’ve always had a little curiosity to me to just take in a lot of that type of information and then slowly piece it together myself.
Well, I would also like to thank everybody out there for listening today. Hopefully, you have the tools you need to have in order to just kind of make a decision, even if it’s not going to be perfect, overcome some of this impostor syndrome, perfectionism, they can all be pretty related, in a way, but thank you for tuning in to Action’s Antidotes and I hope you’ll tune in again to some of the other episodes.
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About Whitney Isola
Whitney is the Chief of Staff at Archer Review, Managing Partner of Pear Partners.
Whitney Isola is a dynamic female entrepreneur and at Archer Review, she drives growth and innovation in medical and nursing test preparation. Originally trained as a Registered Dietitian, Whitney’s career began with impactful work in community hospitals and award-winning plant-based nutrition programs.
Her entrepreneurial spirit led her to co-found a supportive care platform for oncology patients, which she successfully later sold. She now leverages her experience to help Archer Review expand its offerings and maintain high standards in a rapidly growing industry. Whitney is passionate about empowering women in entrepreneurship, advancing career opportunities in healthcare, and integrating technology into education. Notably, Whitney delivered a TEDx talk in 2023 and continues to advocate for impactful solutions in healthcare and education.