- Health equity is a topic that's incredibly important
for us at BCG and in our Health Care practice,
and especially when you talk
about colorectal cancer screening.
What are the obstacles you see when it comes
to health equity and how do you overcome them?
- What I love about what we're doing
at Exact Sciences is it's a focus on health equity.
We just formed a brand new team
about a year and a half ago that every single day
their major remit is how can we make sure
that our products are available regardless
of the zip code you come from, regardless of what type
of--what you think about screening and wellness...
maybe it's not in your culture.
We're going into vulnerable zip codes and populations
and we're making that top of mind.
Whether it's through making sure our products are covered
from a Medicaid, Medicare commercial standpoint,
whether it's making sure our marketing materials
are in different languages, whether we need
to say things differently in different cultures.
That is top of mind for us and that is why one of our levers
is making sure our products, our solutions,
our screening tests are available for all populations.
I spent a day on Capitol Hill talking
to different legislators about March
is colorectal cancer awareness month
and we want to partner
with that legislator in going to vulnerable populations
with the message of getting screened is so important.
So, I think that message has to be explicit.
- I would love to talk about diversity
in the health care industry.
It's also something that we have very high
on our agenda to drive diversity, equity, and inclusion.
- I wouldn't be sitting here if it wasn't a strategy,
a passion for medtech, health care, to really think about
diversity and give people opportunities
for different roles within health care.
So, because of that, I'm happy that we're making progress
and strides, but we're not making strides fast enough.
So, I'd say yes, we're making strides,
but we have a lot of work to do.
And I'll give you just a couple of stats
that I've looked at that I'm passionate about.
At Exact Sciences is a great example.
Our female population is about 58%.
Our non-white population overall is about 28%.
So, we're making strides and we get better every single year,
but if you go to the director level and above, that drops.
My tagline that I always say to our organization,
or any organization that I'm from
is we should look like our customers.
And when I look at our customers, whether they're payers,
whether they're individual, primary care physicians,
or big health systems, they're diverse.
- You mentioned that you want to make sure that you
look like your customers as an organization,
but you are also trying to proactively shape
your customer base by addressing
health equity issues, right?
So, it goes both ways actually.
It's not just a reaction, but it's a proactive push,
changing the way your customers look.
- Our customers now, they call it,
they used to call it the quadruple aim.
Now they call it the quintuple aim
because they've added in health equity,
diversity and inclusion,
and when they see Exact Sciences,
the fact that we have that embedded in our goals
and it's part of the way in which we go to market
and we want to partner, it makes us resonate
so much better with our customers.
(upbeat musical closing)