Telehealth startup Hims & Hers is adding some serious star power to its board.
The company tells Coins2Day that Dr. Toby Cosgrove—the physician-turned-businessman, former CEO of the renowned Cleveland Clinic, and digital health evangelist—has joined the Hims & Hers board. It’s Cosgrove’s latest gig after transitioning from the top perch at Cleveland Clinic in early 2018 (he still remains an adviser there, as well as at Google).
Hims & Hers started off as a company focused on providing medications that patients may find awkward to talk about with their physician, such as erectile dysfunction treatments. But its ambitions and services have grown to include other forms of telemedicine and virtual care.
“Our vision is very much to be the new front door of how people engage with health care,” CEO Andrew Dudum tells Coins2Day in an interview. “We want to treat a very broad set of conditions.”
Dudum says that Hims & Hers has powered more than one million digital health visits across a dozen different conditions (including ED, heart health, and skin conditions) in the past two years.
That expansion—and the focus on easily-accessible virtual care—is what drew Cosgrove to the company.
“I was approached by a young lady through some other contacts, asked if I’d heard of this company and I had not,” Cosgrove tells Coins2Day in an interview. “I was interested in Andrew’s background and concept. It’s a very nice extension of virtual care.”
So what does Cosgrove hope to bring to the company? For one thing, expansion advice. “I’d like to see them continue to expand their repertoire of services, we’ve had discussions on how you can do that,” he says. “Smoking cessation, weight reduction, etc.”
He also plans to use his vast experience across the health care provider and business spectrum to give Hims & Hers strategic advice—such as the right way to interact with regulators and “establish great relationships in Washington,” including with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Dudum says that after he and Cosgrove were connected via a third party, the chemistry was instant. “We talked about how to improve the digital health system, we spent hours on that topic.” The rest, as they say, is history.