Transforming Healthcare with Tech and Care with Whitney Isola

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! --- Listen to the podcast here: 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. --- 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 X It’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 come