Dr. Sophia Yen: CEO of Pandia Health (Raise the Line)

Hi, I'm Sh Ghani. Thanks for checking out the raise line interview series in which me and my cohost doctor Rishi Desai and registered nurse, Janna Amil, explore how to strengthen our healthcare system with some amazing leaders in medicine, technology, education and government and they have some great advice for people starting careers in healthcare as well.

I hope you will watch these highlights and then go listen to the full podcast interview wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Sh in today and raise the line.

I'm happy to be joined by Doctor Sophia Yen. Doctor Yan is one of the co founders and CEO of Pandia Health, a one stop shop for woman's recurring medications, starting with birth control.

She's also board certified and adolescent medicine with more than 20 years of experience in medicine as well as a clinical associate professor of pediatrics in the division of Adolescent Medicine at Stanford Medical School.

So, Sophia, can you start by telling us a bit more about your background, how you got into medicine and then specifically decided to focus on pediatrics.

I've wanted to be a physician since about fourth grade and I love that it was an excuse to buy stickers. So I would buy stairs, not for myself but for my future patients and I couldn't buy just one sheet.

I had to buy three sheets cause it would be sad if you know, a patient took one stick and there wasn't extra stickers for the next patient.

So it was a great way to milk my parents for stickers. But the true I think calling was that I love people and I love science and each person is a different story.

Each person is a different challenge to help them optimize their health. And my mom was a nurse and she said, don't be a nurse, be a doctor because the nurses do all the scut work and the doctors get all the credit.

So I was like, OK, I'll be a doctor but my tip to people out there is if you're gonna do just general primary care, don't be a doctor, be a nurse practitioner because you can do everything a doctor does with less education and you're unionized.

But if you wanna be more specialty, then maybe go for the doctor. I guess one question given that you are a physician and you, you teach so many residents and medical students as well.

What advice would you give to them about meeting the challenges of that COVID has brought and and beyond and it could be around women's health.

It could be in general. I think that telemedicine is here to stay and we need to know what are our limitations as a physician.

I've always been skeptical about telemedicine because it is so easy to do a telemedicine visit and say you covered everything.

But you didn't, you didn't listen to the heart. You didn't look at the ears, you didn't, um, really get a good look at their throat.

You weren't able to do a sample. You didn't even get their vitals.

Um, if they have asthma, can you really listen to their lungs and certainly the equipment is coming and when that equipment is here.

Yes. But before then we need to admit our limitations, one big problem with consumer driven health care is Yelp and other reviews, right?

Because those of us in medicine know, sometimes you have to be the bad guy. Right?

And are you gonna give me a five out of five Yelp review? No.

And as a pediatrician we see it all the time because we're like, no antibiotics for you. And you're like, but I want antibiotics, but 95% chance you got a virus.

And so that is, I think something we need to look at and tackle and we see it both in person and also by Temed. But if the consumer is paying for that visit, they're gonna expect results and they get very upset if you don't give them what they want, but sometimes what you want is not in your best interest.

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