E6: Interview with Juliana Di Simone - Founder & CEO, Forela Health

Welcome to episode 6 of the OVERcast! We are excited to meet Juliana Di Simone as she tells the story of founding Forela Health. Hear her inspirational story of perseverance and ambition as she builds the first women's health infrastructure platform serving endometriosis and autoimmune conditions.

If you like the OVERcast, please give us a five star rating and even a review. It helps the podcast expand and reach more founders like you who are transforming healthcare for all of us.

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About Juliana Di Simone

Juliana Di Simone is the Founder & CEO of Forela, a technology platform bridging the gap between autoimmune disease and predictive intelligence. Drawing on three decades of lived experience and expertise in product development and growth, she guides a team building adaptive infrastructure that transforms fragmented care into a connected ecosystem. Under her leadership, Forela unites patients, providers, and partners to deliver predictive, integrated, and equitable care—bringing clarity and agency to women navigating inflammatory and autoimmune conditions.

Transcript

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]

David S. Williams III:

Hey everyone, and welcome to The Overcast.

The official podcast of OVERLAB, where we help entrepreneurs overcome the obstacles of starting and growing a business in health care.

Today we are at UCLA. Anderson and I have the honor and privilege of interviewing Juliana Di Simone, the founder and CEO of Forela Health.

And in this episode,

I want you to understand what it's like to start from the beginning and how you use your lived experience to drive the development of a company.

And so with that, Julianna, welcome to The Overcast.

Juliana Di Simone:

Thanks for having me, David. I am so excited about talking to you about Forela because I think it's world changing.

David S. Williams III:

To start, please tell us about yourself and give us a little bit about Forela so that we can orient all of the listeners here on the overcast.

Juliana Di Simone:

Yeah, absolutely. so I'm Juliana, I am a third time founder.

I've been here before, uh, started with a direct to consumer brand.

moved into retail tech and now doing, health care tech, Forela,

which is what I'm now building, is a adaptive health system for women with complex and chronic conditions.

It's borne from my own lived experience and something.

I'm excited to be here and talk to you about.

David S. Williams III:

Excellent, excellent. So as I've mentioned before, when we talk to people, we want to understand their story.

So I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about where you've been and what brings you here and where you are today.

Juliana Di Simone:

so. It's the personal and the business are tied together in this and this story.

I for 27 years have been navigating a very, uh, roller coaster of a health journey.

it's funny, I started thinking about, I've been saying, 27 years, but I realized this morning that it's actually longer than that.

27 is from my first cycle menstrual cycle, which is what I consider as a trigger moment.

But I remember being nine and having symptoms, and now I'm going back into like, oh, actually, this is a much longer health journey than I recall,

but let's use 27 as the baseline, which is what I have been using 27 years to diagnosis and trying to figure out what was going on with my body.

I saw a series of different specialists.

I saw, I think I did every single test you can think of.

I found tests that when I book them at, uh, Cedars, they asked me, how did you learn about this?

This is still in clinical trial. Wow. Because I was so desperate to understand what was happening with my body.

Every time I went to the doctor, it was normal. You're normal.

You're fine. Your symptoms are in your head.

and it wasn't until about over a year ago that I finally found care.

That changed everything for me.

I found a doctor that not only diagnosed me, she also made very clear that everything I lived for 27 years were real.

I wasn't making it up. It was happening in my body.

that was doctor Iris Orbach. And she completely changed my life.

I walked into her office, and the first thing she said was, we believe you, and we'll take care of you.

And everything you're telling me is related.

And so that day, she diagnosed me with, um, endometriosis, Adena meiosis,

and about seven other co-morbidities that were happening all in parallel at the same time.

And so I was seeing different doctors for all of those things, but no one's talking to each other.

And that's, I think, one of the biggest issues with autoimmune and,

and highly complex inflammatory conditions is that it takes at least six years for an autoimmune disease to be diagnosed.

It takes 12 years in average for endometriosis to be diagnosed.

No one is talking to each other in health care.

And no one's listening to the woman where everything is happening within her body.

She knows these things are going on. I knew these things were going on, but no one was listening enough or being able to connect the dots.

And I don't blame the doctors I saw.

I actually think it's much deeper of an issue because into education, it goes into the structure of how our healthcare system is built.

And that isn't just in this country. I was born in Brazil.

I grew up in the UK and I now live here.

Those are three countries that treated me in the same way in one way or another.

Symptoms started in Brazil, continued in the UK and then evolved into being here, finally being diagnosed.

So it's a it's much more of a systemic issue.

And that's where, um, we're very excited about where we're building and being able to fix that.

But back to my story.

David S. Williams III:

Oh, we're going to unpack a lot of what you said during this time, because you said a lot.

And most people who know me know that I'm a direct disciple of everything that you're talking about.

So please continue, though, about about your story.

Juliana Di Simone:

And so what Doctor Orbach did wasn't just giving me the understanding of, yes,

all of these things are related, endo is causing all of this to happen at once in your body.

David S. Williams III:

Endo is short for endometriosis is right.

Juliana Di Simone:

I'm probably summarizing everything in a way that Iris as a provider probably wouldn't.

But in a way it was like in my mind my understanding was, yes, this is all correlated.

This is one big storm that's happening in your body.

And as a reference, at that point, I could only stay awake for about three hours at a time,

which was really hard as a founder of my second startup at that point, trying to build a company,

trying to have a life, try to stay awake, this was a huge challenge where I would be up for three hours,

have to sleep for about two hours to gain enough energy to continue my day.

And I was still getting the whole eight hours of sleep at night. So it wasn't a lack of sleep, right?

But my nervous system was in such overdrive because of all of this inflammation that was going on in my body that it couldn't manage everything that was going on.

And so the approach that Iris had was much more of an iris, as Doctor Orbach and I, by calling her by her first name because she's now my co-founder.

She built this incredible protocol for the treatment of endometriosis, where she says, the woman for a person and not as an organ.

It's no longer just treating the one thing that is wrong.

It's treating the entire body. The mind. It's.

It's a woman as her whole self, the whole person, her whole life.

Because we all have unique lives and we all have unique,

the way in endometriosis shows up in women's bodies is completely different to one woman to another.

And I think that's one of the reasons why it takes so long also to diagnose, because we're putting these boxes,

and my box didn't meet the box that every doctor went to see before, uh, was trying to put me in to say I had endometriosis.

Right. And so I left her office feeling really empowered.

And I knew everything I had to do from that day onwards.

And that was follow a specific diet to help my bladder reduce inflammation, follow specific,

physical therapy protocols, um, follow specific drug protocols that were needed.

But also, she talked to me about the fact that I was doubting my body for 27 years.

I was told what was happening in my body wasn't happening, and she brought me back to it.

And to her suggestion was, have you thought, I know you do therapy?

Have you thought about somatic therapy that might help you understand and believe in your body again?

And so it wasn't just your body needs this.

It was how can we bring your mind and body together so we can really treat you holistically?

And we're not going to talk about surgery. There's no doubt you need surgery, but we're not going to talk about that.

Because if you go into surgery today, you're going to feel worse tomorrow than you feel today.

We're not going to do that. Go home, do this, and I'll see you in six weeks.

And I felt really incredibly empowered.

And then I got home and I was like, okay, how do I tackle this?

Because now I have to I have all of these things I have to do, but I also have to track my symptoms.

I have to see and spot patterns.

How am I going to spot patterns? So all of a sudden I have multiple spreadsheets, multiple apps, wearables.

Right. I'm like, okay, what do I do? And I realized I couldn't do this by myself.

And I'm not an engineer per se, but I'm, I'm a I'm a curious to be engineer kind of person.

And so I built a tool to help me. And what I did with this tool is I used all of my data, and when I say all of it, it really is all of it.

I had data from ten years ago on some nutrition app that I used for three weeks.

Mhm. And I had my medical records, even though my medical records were 27 years and this diagnosis I still use that.

Mhm. I use then all of the information I could find myself in one place.

And then on the other side,

Iris's protocol what she defined as next steps for me based on these conditions happening in parallel in my body and in between,

I built a little engine. And what this engine did was watch my symptoms, watch build patterns for me and map everything against the protocol.

So that was the diet I had to follow, the breathing exercises I had to do,

the physical therapy exercises I had to do at home, not just with the therapist.

So everything I had to do by myself.

And what it did was in six weeks, when I went back to see Iris, she asked me, in a scale from 0 to 100%, how much better do you feel?

And I said, 60%. And she's like. Wow.

I was not expecting this. Wow. Significant.

That is a lot. 27 years of inflammation.

In six weeks, I was able to improve that much.

Mhm. And the reason was that I, I. There are many, many reasons I really followed this protocol.

But the reason I could do is because I wasn't connecting the dots anymore.

I wasn't trying to figure out every single step of my diet on a day, because that becomes a full time job.

Mhm. And as a woman with a full time job, a family and everything else that you know, you have to do on a daily basis.

That wasn't a job I was willing to take, but I needed to take in order to feel better.

And what this engine did was it empowered me.

It gave me agency. It gave me an understanding of my body.

And very quickly it started helping me feel better.

Not because you was telling me I'm feeling better. It was adapting to my day, giving me what I needed on that day.

Micro doses instead of a to do list. I had many doses of what to do, and I realized the reason it worked was because.

Human behavior is one of the hardest things to change. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. But that's because when we leave the doctor's office, we have a list of.

Here's what you have to do. And then life happens.

Mhm. And you might do it for three days, four days, five days.

But then life goes on and your dog gets into your routine.

You end up having certain things that, you know, take you and distract you.

Understood. Life happens. Yeah.

And all of a sudden, this engine had a clear understanding of what my days looked like, what I was eating, how I was eating,

what were the biggest burdens of my life in that moment,

and helping me with these micro doses and trying to adapt my diet, my care, so on and so forth.

David S. Williams III:

Let me, let me, let me jump in here because I want to what you're talking about here, I'm going to summarize a little bit.

And then I want to get into this engine in this microdosing as you call it.

You decided when, after meeting with Iris, Doctor Orbach, uh, who, by the way, I will disclose, is a high school classmate of mine.

Now, we graduated from the same high school. That's how I met Juliana in the first place.

So, it was also my honor to to meet you as well.

Through Iris. But you decided after you met with Iris.

She essentially said one gave you some validation.

She said what you're feeling is real, right?

You said before other people were saying was in your head, but you did something that I believe is unique.

And there are only a small percentage of people who do this, which is essentially say,

I'm going to now take this agency that I feel like I now have, and I'm going to do something with it, and I'm going to use data.

And one of the things that I have found in my experience, because character is a data platform also that helps people manage, um, complex conditions.

People don't necessarily understand the value of their real world data,

their past data, their nutrition data, their symptoms that they've been able to track.

They don't they don't make those connections right. What is it that when you left the doctor's office, what made it?

So clear to you that that's what you needed to do. Like, where did that come from?

Because I think also a lot of entrepreneurs are trying to figure out, well, what is it that I know, what's my lived experience?

And then how can I translate that into something that I need, whether it's a company or it's just my personal care?

Juliana Di Simone:

Yeah. It's a. I first did a lot of research.

I was like, there has to be something out there that can help me do this.

And everything that said did what I needed didn't.

Okay. That's always the first thing. It failed somewhere.

It either looked at endometriosis as a period disease, not the full body inflammatory condition that it is, or even looked at it just from a.

Nutrition perspective, but it was then looking only at endometriosis was in looking at the fact that because of endometriosis,

I developed interstitial cystitis, which then an anti-inflammatory diet based on ginger and turmeric was actually making

my symptoms worse because my bladder couldn't take the ginger and the turmeric.

It wasn't adapting to me was just one size fits all right?

Health care or wellness? And so first I did a lot of research.

There has to be something out there. No there isn't. Let me just use Google Sheets.

Right. But what happened was with my second startup, we developed a personalized commerce experience, uh,

platform where we built a tool that through community hubs that were I'm going to

really summarize what we were doing because it was a lot more robust than that.

But in a community hub, you would understand through, uh, consumer data, which also there's so much out there,

we don't realize how much of our data is just public that can be used by.

That's a whole different story, but we use consumer data to then give these participants within a community,

very specific niche, targeted consumer experiences.

so even though you and I were in a community hub together, our experience with a brand was unique.

and we should experience that differently.

David S. Williams III:

So you're taking that mentality and applying it to yourself.

Juliana Di Simone:

Yeah. And I was like, if we do this with commerce, why can't we not do it for health care?

So that was the catalyst for me.

It was like, okay, I have this list of what I have to do, and I have this background of what was done before and how much I learned from it.

Maybe I can put the two together and build a tool that can help me.

and so that's where it was kind of that was the moment it was born.

David S. Williams III:

And that is the lesson I want entrepreneurs to learn is because when faced with an issue and you have problem that you want to solve, you can look at all of the things that you have done personally, professionally, in your experience to come up with solutions.

It isn't something that you feel like you necessarily have to invent out of thin air.

I mean, these things have to come from somewhere, and this is such a great example.

So I want to let you get back to microdosing and how that, that concept, what do you mean by micro doses versus a to do list?

I kind of want you to, you know, play that a little bit.

But then also, um, that's when I want to transition to the question of you've gone through a really traumatic personal experience for a long time.

Juliana Di Simone:

Thank you. Yeah.

David S. Williams III:

Then it's like, why start another company like you've you've started startups before, right?

Like this. You know, it's a journey. Um, and it's rough. So, that's that's first do the microdosing conversation.

But then I do want to ask you the question, why? Why start Forela?

Juliana Di Simone:

Please, can I flip it?

David S. Williams III:

You can flip it.

Juliana Di Simone:

Yes, absolutely. Because you're, you know, going from founders finding a problem and then building something from it.

The reason why I'm so motivated to start another company now is because for the first time in my startup journey, I feel.

A purpose on what I'm building. I didn't discover a problem and try to build a solution on top of it.

I lived the problem. I know the pain.

I lived a traumatic experience. And that is from. There's a lot of medical trauma that we don't talk about that.

But the medical trauma that is accumulating on trying to navigate a condition that everyone tells you it's not there,

and women really experience this much more, not just with chronic conditions, but very, very often.

We go to the doctor and we're told it's stress and we need to drink more water.

Those are the two, you know, solutions that we're given as women.

And again, I don't blame the doctors. It's it's much, much deeper.

Mhm. And what we're doing now, we actually want to empower providers.

It's not just empowering the woman but like how can we really build an ecosystem that is changing how we approach women's health.

Mhm. But. Because I lift the problem, I have a different connection with it and because I suffered from it.

That was the moment where I realized we have a business in our hands.

Was the moment that. I don't want any other woman to suffer.

I have this little magic pill, and I don't even like to say that because there isn't a magic pill, right?

There isn't, like a one solution to chronic conditions.

It's a series of things. And how we approach our lifestyle is just as important as how we approach what medications the doctor tells us.

We need to take. But I have this thing that worked for me.

I want more people to have access to this.

And so for the first time, I actually have a connection of purpose that I didn't necessarily have with my previous startups,

where even with the second one, a lot of it was just.

Covid retail was at a shifting point.

We knew it was kind of broken, uh, and there was a big gap between the experiences we have with brands in the physical retail and websites.

We knew there was a big gap there, and we couldn't access the place that builds the connection.

So how can we build out connection? But it was still, at the end of the day, was it?

It was nothing wrong with building a product that you're just building because you see a problem out of it, but this is very different.

It's personal. And I think that's where, um, a it comes.

So that's why I'm flipping because it goes back to the original.

David S. Williams III:

But I want to, I want to. Repeat something you just said is in that thing.

It's so important. Which is you said, I don't want others to experience the same thing I did.

I find that to be more rare than it should be. I think founders and entrepreneurs are those people.

Especially in health care. I don't want other people to have to go through what I went through.

There's a company here to do that. There's a way that I can help them and the way the economic models work.

Sure. Yes. People should get paid for doing some. Some. You know, really building something that that changes the world.

So I want to congratulate you on that,

because I do believe that that is something that drives specifically health care entrepreneurs more than in other spaces,

like you said, in retail and so forth, so forth.

So I do want to give you credit for that and stop and pause on it, because I think it's super important for other entrepreneurs, other founders.

You're talking to us and talking to you in the overcast who are building health care related companies.

So thank you for that.

Juliana Di Simone:

Now, thank you for acknowledging that.

It's funny because when I introduced Iris to the concept and the engine itself.

She said, you took my life's work and put it on steroids.

Mhm. And I was like, yes, that's exactly what, what?

I just did it. It's all based on hard work and hard work.

First place was helping women. Mhm. And helping women understand what's happening into your bodies.

How to feel better and. I don't say lightly that she changed my life.

She truly, truly changed my life in so many ways.

The fact that I can stay awake the entire day name is because of the protocol that she

has developed and worked on 20 plus years developing and improving and so watching.

Her passion has also built passion.

It's like it's a magnet. If it makes sense, it's not.

It's not just. I'm not alone in this like it's a it's it's a, it's a team effort and a team sort of passion that is navigating out.

And even like with the the man we have in the team now, they're like,

I'm watching all these things happen to my partner and to my mom and to my grandma, and that's not okay.

It's taking too long for this to be fixed.

Not that, you know, some things just it's, again, it's not the magic pill,

but it's seeing that understanding of like, this is not okay anymore and we change and I think I feel.

I feel really empowered to have people like that around me now,

because I think it's very supportive and people like yourself who are like, yes, this is so important and what you're doing is important.

Keep pushing. So it goes back to that. Like, now I know we're helping people.

It has a different impact.

David S. Williams III:

Absolutely. So then let's go deeper then on Forela.

What? What is Forela? You said that Iris said.

And by the way, Irish is amazing and I feel the exact same way about her as well.

And I'm glad that she and you have now brought this, this energy to each other, to build this,

but talk about Forela and what it's going to be for people,

at what stage you're in and what what do you see the next three months really right now?

What does the next three months look like for Forela? So kind of give everybody a sense of that.

Juliana Di Simone:

Yeah. Uh, they're busy three months.

So we are, as I mentioned, we're building a adaptive health system for women with inflammatory and autoimmune conditions.

But what does that actually mean? Um. There is no infrastructure right now that we can really tap into that supports consumers.

Well, patients, providers and clinical partners all at once that it's built on women's data.

as an infrastructure that supports all of those.

so that's what we're building. We're building. I keep saying there's no box where Forela fits in.

Right. So I can't be like, oh, can you say you're the stripe of whatever.

No, because there isn't a stripe of something that we are.

But in a way stripe is is payment infrastructure.

Right. So we are stripe for healthcare, right. But not for payments but for data and care.

So what we're building is I like to look at it in these three ways.

So for patients and women what it does is it helps them with personalized health support every day.

And I say what happens between the six weeks of appointment are the things that doctors don't see.

and that is the hardest period to be navigating.

Very often I would go to the doctor's office and I would look fine.

So nothing is going on with me the next day.

I have hives all over my body and they don't see that.

So when I go and I tell them they don't believe because it doesn't match everything else that's happening in my body.

So for us is how do we empower women with helping them navigate symptoms as they show up, but also avoid them from showing up all together?

Using me as an example in you that every time I had symptoms A and B, I would eventually develop C on that same day.

What it started doing was because I knew that pattern E helped me through again, going back to the medical protocol.

Um. Not wellness. Nothing wrong with wellness,

but going back to the medical protocol saying based on this medical protocol and these conditions that

are running in parallel in your body and what the stress you're going through right now in your life,

the foods you're eating, um, the exercises you've been doing, you should do this to avoid C, um, and all of a sudden C was no longer happening.

And then we started doing that to avoid B and to avoid A.

And that's how in six weeks I was able to get 60% better is because of those micro doses.

It wasn't so much as a laundry list of things that I had to do.

she understood my entire lifestyle.

David S. Williams III:

So it was giving you a real time feedback loop on things that you could do moment to moment versus having to say,

these are the ten things that you should do today. that will make you better.

Juliana Di Simone:

It's far more adaptive to use your word, and it adapted to me based on the day.

If I had eight meetings in a day, back to back.

It gave me a very different protocol than if I had a full day off in knew how much bandwidth I had, and it's unbelievable.

So. That is so important for us, again, because we live in these bodies and no one yet no one's asking us, what do you need?

So we're putting the woman as the centerpiece of everything that we develop.

And that's why our product becomes as a direct to consumer product, first and foremost.

Because if we're not listening to women, how are we supposed to treat them?

How are we supposed to help them feel better if we're not actually listening to the core of what's happening to the core?

Wounds to happened in her life, to how the symptoms are showing up in her every day, based on what's actually happening on her every day.

So for us, putting the woman as the center is the only way forward.

So for women, we really I like to say we are.

Forela is the hand. Was the hand holding mine when no one else was there?

He really helped me navigate my every day.

Based on what was happening on that specific day in my life for providers, it's then having that visibility.

Mhm. If you only have seven minutes with a patient.

And they spend seven six minutes talking about.

Whatever. And a lot of times it isn't the kind of conversation that you need to be having.

How are you supposed to in one minute, help them go home and feel better?

So what Forela does is give providers a clear view of what has happened with that patient in the past six weeks or a year or whatever,

however long it has been between appointments and.

Because it has enough data.

David S. Williams III:

That infrastructure also supports the doctor, the provider, on making better, quicker decisions for that patient, more personalized decisions.

One of the things that I got from when I building out what we were doing in carethree (Care3)

on the consumer side was there are two questions that you have to answer when you walk into the doctor's office.

First one is, how are you feeling right now? The second one is what has happened since the last time I saw you.

Right. And the answering to the second one is the most important.

And the one that everybody gets wrong. Because either they don't remember as a consumer or as a patient.

I don't remember in the moment that four weeks ago I had some kind of allergic reaction, but I didn't have a way to log it documented.

And then when I go in the doctor's office, I have forgotten in that time by that could be extremely clinically relevant.

Right. So what you're talking about is I now with Fiorella,

essentially what have some kind of packaged way of saying this is what has happened to me over the last six weeks since the last time I've seen you.

And these are the things that I found that were important, giving agency,

because those are the things that I find that people have a hard time in front of the doctor. Is is having that voice.

These are the things that I thought were important.

It sounds like you're building something that also empowers the patient to have the right conversation with provider,

not just the provider, to have the right conversation with the patients.

Juliana Di Simone:

Yeah, absolutely. And it's way it's like someone told me this, oh,

you can you can just go and check it out and you get like a list of questions that you can ask your provider.

And it's like. Great. But think about how much time you spent going back and forth, how you shared your medical information to, non HIPAA compliant platform that is also trying to train off of your data.

David S. Williams III:

We all get into that on the spot either. Keep going.

Juliana Di Simone:

…and how at the end of the day, you're still the one connecting the dots.

It's not different to what we're living on right now. You go to the urologist, to the gastro and to the OB.

No one speaks to each other. You're still connecting the dots.

You're still spotting the patterns. What? What we're saying is, you know that allergic reaction you had.

Well, every time you had that allergic reaction, you did this thing the day before.

This is identifying your triggers. And it's not blaming the patient for what's happening in their bodies, just bringing visibility and understanding.

But if you don't know when you're at the doctor's office, what those triggers are, how is how are you even going to be able to educate some,

some general generic AI machine that also is based on the same data sets that, you know, we know healthcare is set on right now, which is male focus.

Mhm. There is a bias we can't deny. And that is built into AI right now.

That's something that I think a lot of.

The general population overlooks is just how women are, quote unquote, underserved, and everybody likes to throw around.

That is a term, but there is an actual bias.

In the way that the medical literature is completed, the way that it's evaluated,

who's participating in certain types of trials for certain types of things, and then those that are not even getting trials.

The same is true for African-Americans and Latinos. So this this is this is something I'm first in.

David S. Williams III:

So when I hear you say this, I'm giving a little bit more emphasis to it, because I think most people,

especially for entrepreneurs, founders that we're talking about in health care, there is some awareness.

I don't think they understand the acuity, just how acute the problem is.

Yeah. Um, and how many solutions we need, we need to, to address these, these disparities.

Juliana Di Simone:

Yeah. And that's one of the pieces we're also super excited is about.

And that ties them into clinical partnerships.

We are. Research mechanism.

One that hasn't been done until now, and…

David S. Williams III:

I actually was co-founder of the company that came closest, which was PatientsLikeMe.

We were a company that worked with research institutions, collecting real world data across multiple conditions.

and we had in 17 different diseases, built more data with, you know, co-occurring conditions, data than ever existed before.

And I can tell you, nobody knew what to do with us for a long time.

What you're talking about, though, is a new generation of that.

We were doing things in the, you know, 20 tens.

This is pre I, this is pre um, even full development of machine learning.

We were doing the earliest types of things using real world data and natural language

processing across all the different forms and things like that did amazing things.

What you're doing with Forela, from what you've already said, and I know you're about to say more and I'm, I'm, I'm I'm floored by it.

You know this. Is world changing.

Juliana Di Simone:

Absolutely world changing.

David S. Williams III:

and I think one of the things that I want to, get everybody understand is, um, when you point this at women, it's because of the bias.

Women don't have this. Men have far more data that are tied to male men's health.

in the medical literature, that is.

I'm trying to choose my words carefully.

that is very deep in how, , the understanding of, different conditions and core conditions among men.

The same has never been done for one. Yeah. It's, uh, you know, it's if we are at a moment of change.

Juliana Di Simone:

Yes. And we're excited to be part of that change.

And that's really what we want to build here is a new way of thinking of.

Women's health in general, and also knowing that.

There's higher dismissal in women's symptoms.

Autoimmune conditions. Okay. It's.

Interesting how I said this data to someone the other day and they like it can't be true.

because they were like, why are you building this for women and not for everyone?

David S. Williams III:

Notice I didn't ask you that question. Mind you, but keep going.

Juliana Di Simone:

…because 1 in 5 Americans has an autoimmune condition that is 50 million people.

80% of those are women. Mhm. So that is why we are focusing on women.

It doesn't mean that men with autoimmune conditions should be dismissed.

That's not the point at all. The point is there isn't data, there isn't support.

And when women get so dismissed at a doctor's office and there is this bias,

we need to make change and we need to focus on this completely underserved market.

And. I think so many products out there for women are so important, but they focus on.

Fertility. Or cycles.

Now thank God. Menopause. Mhm. but it's still, it's, it's these moments of life that we go through as women.

It's not this constant, not lifestyle driven, not chronic.

Exactly. And. I see that as us just building modern silos in health care.

David S. Williams III:

Mhm. That's well said.

Juliana Di Simone:

It's the new version of what we've been seeing happening so far in going to the different doctors.

What we're trying to do is bring all of that together, everything together,

into one place where the woman has visibility, where her provider has visibility.

And for clinical partners who are out there actually doing life changing research,

have real world information of how what they're trying to do is impacting the real people living with that in the first place.

So that's why I keep saying there's no box that we sit in.

We're building a new box. Uh, is every side of the box unique?

No, we're using we're using paper. We're using cardboard that we've seen before, but we're assembling it in a way that hasn't been done before.

David S. Williams III:

Well, I like that you talk about this is essentially a new category.

It's a new thing. But it's it's the fact that the things that you're pulling together have never been put together.

But this is how humans live. We are all of these things.

Medicine is siloed because you want to go deep and understand certain systems.

Understood. But you just you said it before, people are not talking to each other.

And then you'll hear this analogy, I'm sure, like when you know, when you're a hammer, everything's a nail.

So you have the same solution. As soon as you see one thing, it's that one solution if you're going deep.

But if you had been talking to 2 or 3 other doctors who are also looking at the same problem and they had theirs,

if you came together or had the information that somehow they could all see, would they come up with a different treatment plan?

Juliana Di Simone:

And that's why functional medicine has such different results on patients.

It's much more hands on, right? It is personalized to that patient, but the cost of it is one that not many people can afford.

Access is a huge problem.

David S. Williams III:

And then we're not even going to go into, you know, all that's happening with health care and the lack of access that we're about to experience.

Juliana Di Simone:

But so another episode for us is how do we make care accessible?

How does a woman in the middle of the country that doesn't have access to Iris

Orbuch can be treated with the same quality of care that I was treated?

Just because I live in Los Angeles and had the financial means, doesn't mean I deserve care better.

and so I'm bringing that care to people that don't have access is one of the first things I've attended a lot of health care, conferences and, um, conversations.

And I realized that one of the things that keeps coming back the most for me

is that a lot of the burden gets put back on the woman in this conversations.

It's, oh, women just need more education.

They need not in the sense of, oh, they're not educated enough, but they need education about the conditions that they have.

And so they'll make better decisions.

Oh, women need access to, um, tools that help them do this thing or that it's at the end of the day, they all just make the woman work harder.

but we're tired. We're sick. We we have a family.

We have a life to lead. It's not the woman isn't the solution.

And so one of the key things I want is for us to remove the burden.

remove the burden from the woman, from connecting the dots,

the time consumption that it takes to self-diagnose or navigate a diagnosis, because the diagnosis is just the beginning of it.

And then from there on, also the financial burden, if data says there's I think it's $2,100 in out-of-pocket costs that women with autoimmune,

uh, autoimmune conditions, um, spend a year in their care.

I can tell you from experience (DSWIII - that sounds low), but that is not real.

But even if it is 2100, that's all that's out of pocket, right?

So that's outside of all of the other things that we're already paying with our health insurance coverage.

If you have it, if you don't have that number. So the higher I pay for health insurance, and I still had more than $2,100 out of pocket,

and we want that reduced or eliminated as much as we can so women can have access to, um, the same kind of care that I had access to.

David S. Williams III:

I absolutely. I am so impressed. This is so amazing.

I want to return to one thing because I think it's relevant, which is 90 days over the next 3 to 6 months look like.

and then I want to add into this, this one piece, which is we have an audience,

fellow founders, but also have investors, and also an ecosystem partners.

And so I wanted you to, as part of your, your your answer response, keep them in mind.

And what can they do to help further Forela, and your goals?

Juliana Di Simone:

90 days. I think we're talking that telepathy here because I was like, the 90 days.

I have an answer to, uh, so much happening in the next 90 days.

We are actually about to, test our first, engine, results.

Um, we know mine worked, but mine cannot be taken to market.

So this is going to be the first the first trial.

We are onboarding, um, our first users, which is very exciting.

Uh, I actually haven't talked about this publicly yet, so this is the first time.

David S. Williams III:

We love breaking news on the overcast.

Juliana Di Simone:

We are onboarding ten women. We're calling them their founding ten.

These are ten women that will have access to, really, it's the MVP or the MVP's of the for our direct to consumer product.

but on top of that is direct access to doctor Iris Orbach as the care coordinator for their care.

which I'm really excited to bring her work to ten women who want to join us early on in this piece of, like, really helping us.

Shape what this the actual MVP look like and and how it would all, uh, work for consumers as we go to market.

Outside of that, we're fundraising. So, , it's a big time, for that.

And we're growing our team., we're we just brought in some additional talent that we're very excited about to help build and scale.

so, yeah, there's a lot of good momentum in the next 90 days.

David S. Williams III:

Okay, fundraising. Everybody wants to know about, you know, fundraising.

Um, so you're really talking about I'm talking everybody out here in the audience.

If, you know, investors who are looking at something in women's health.

Contact Juliana because this is world changing for women's health in general.

And I want to I'm making a pitch. Just straight pitch for you.

I'm already making introductions.

Um, I just said before we came on here that I had one of my contacts have said yes, please, let's have an introduction and do a meeting.

I want everybody out there to do the same thing. Because I believe.

I believe in you, and I believe in Forela. So that's what 90 days looks like.

I'm excited about this. MVP of MVP's, if you will. This this this founding ten.

That's exciting. That's exciting.

And it's amazing that you could bring, uh, some kind of iris to these people, too, because that's the world changing for them.

Like it was life-changing for you.

Juliana Di Simone:

Yeah, absolutely.

And we are. We're also very focused in the this initial, founding ten is also very focused on pelvic inflammation.

Okay.

which we know a lot of the traditional literature doesn't look at endometriosis in at all as an autoimmune condition, but it behaves like one.

and so for us, anything that behaves like it is part of it, right?

It's full body, it's chronic, and it OVERLABs a lot with other autoimmune conditions actually.

30% of women with endo will develop an autoimmune condition later on.

And so, um, we are very focused on this first piece of the product being focused on the pelvic inflammation side of things.

But as we evolve outside of the 90 days, we start going into, uh,

biology linked conditions that are related that fall more into that autoimmune, traditional, um, sort of, uh, condition.

And we built an incredible scientific board to help us, uh, build those clinical protocols, um,

for care and looking into how the symptoms behave within women's bodies out of their

practices from having treated women with these exact conditions for over 20 years.

So we're very excited about that. And that all rolls out after the 90 days.

But I'm really excited that that is coming. I'm already looking into the future.

You're supposed to.

but in terms of, what, people that are listening can help, uh, because we really are looking into for ally as a new ecosystem.

there's so much opportunity for us to partner with.

Different people doing different things.

And so I like to look at it. If you're a founder and you're building in health care,

what we're building can most likely support you, and what you're building can most likely support us.

And so please do get in touch because. I think the more eyes in attention into these conditions, particularly how they impact women,

the better our chances of changing health care for women.

If you're an investor, David already did very kindly the pitch for us,

but we are fundraising and really looking for investors that understand that we are a category defining company.

There isn't anything like us. And so the traditional play box of what, you know, I get asked all the time,

how are you different to these and these direct to consumer companies that are tackling healthcare or these B2B providers or these other companies?

We're not a like any of them, even though there's a lot of similarities.

And so if you're looking for something that's very unique and you're hungry and want to see an impact and change in women's health, uh, yes.

Do reach out. And if you are in health care already, if you're, um, an insurance company.

Have you know any, in market EMR solution or whatever it is that you're already doing, , from infrastructure to actually providing care?

The final care two patients do reach out because, again, what we're building is infrastructure.

And we want to learn and evolve into being a product that.

Makes sense for everyone. Even though we're putting the woman as the centerpiece, we are listening to her into her body.

At the end of the day, and this goes back to the first question of like founders, unless you're building a product that people want.

You're just wasting your time. And we've done enough research.

Before we even started. We interviewed everyone from patient to provider and everything in between to know that what we're building is needed.

So we're very confident about it. Uh, but we still want to meet the needs of those that are out there already doing the work.

And so we want to partner, we want to collaborate. So just reach out.

David S. Williams III:

That's wonderful.

And as a founder of a solution right now that works with consumers,, in the real world data space, we will definitely be collaborating over time.

So that's true. So I am personally going to be collaborating,, with you and with Forela in the future.

Um, I want to wrap up, but there's something that that,

I've been saying a lot recently that seems to resonate with people and I think is relevant here.

As everybody knows, who who knows me is I have a son with severe autism.

And when I'm talking to other parents who have children who are on the spectrum.

The question I get most, and I think this is going to sound very familiar, based on what you've already said is what did I do?

Because my son has gotten a 40% improvement in his autism symptoms by measurement over time.

And so a lot of people are saying, well, I want to replicate that.

What did you do? I want to know what you do. I want to copy it because maybe you can work for me.

My response is always every child with autism is different.

Similar to what you said, the expression of enemy crosses and other co-occurring conditions is going to be different for each one.

And so I go through this long preamble because the most important question isn't what did I do?

It's how did I do it. Mhm.

Because it was going through a process that said, let me understand what autism looks like for my son, specifically, what is his experience?

And then how can we, as me and my wife, continuously build things that can improve him by tackling things as we go?

It's like that is replicable. It may not be what we did that that's important to you as a parent.

And I'm talking to you as a parent of a child on the spectrum. But how I did it matters what you literally just said here.

It just popped in my mind, obviously, and I'm bringing this out. Is that.

What worked for you. Worked for you. But that may not work for other women.

But how you did it can work for everyone.

Yeah, and it sounds like that is what Forela is.

Juliana Di Simone:

Yeah, I. Could not agree with you more.

I am in. I don't know how many anymore because I lost count.

Communities for women with endometriosis and the amount of DIY work that goes into navigating these conditions.

Isn't. Mind blowing. Has anyone done this?

Has anyone eaten this? Did anyone tried this diet?

Have you tried this medication? There's such an importance in that community work, actually, because you don't feel alone.

Like there's. There's so many links here. Connection does matter.

It matters so much. And that's something that we are eventually bringing into the product that we're building because by.

I always felt alone. But there's seven other million women in the US with endometriosis.

I wasn't alone, but I felt really alone in my journey, and finding these communities made me feel a little bit more connected.

But some of my closest friends have not. But and some of my closest friends have endo.

None of our cases are the same, but there women in the chat group that even though they're not the same, there's some similarities and we can start.

What we are doing is starting to build these patterns that then get mapped into.

It's not just what's happening with me, but it's what's happening with this entire community.

We're starting to notice patterns of this is working for patient X, but it's not working for patient Y.

Why is that what's happening? And we're finally at a point with technology that we can do that.

Right. And we can see that. And.

It's understood. What I'm trying to say is yes to what you said.

It's how I did it. How also what was happening in my life at that point.

What was going on? Those things also have an impact in navigating care, because whenever I'm more stressed, things look very different.

And when I'm not stressed. Mhm.

and so understanding that and then building those parallels with different women that are navigating the same but different situations.

And so tying all of that together is really at the core of what we are trying to build,

what we are building, not trying, what I've built for myself.

And like I said, well, what I did for myself work for someone else.

Maybe not because it was done very specifically,

but we're now taking that many Forela and building scalability into it that

we can then take it forward to hopefully as many women as we can possibly help.

David S. Williams III:

Absolutely. I am so excited for you and for Forela.

Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us on The Overcast.

And again, I will make my direct pitch. If you want to contact Juliana on the website, you will be able to get her contact information.

Let's go out there and make change for women in health care.

Juliana Di Simone:

Yeah, let's do it. Thank you. David. Thank you.