We recently connected with Tiffany Whitlow and have shared our conversation below.
Tiffany, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.
Our mission is very simple, health equity through inclusive clinical research. For way too long I feel like people have not been afforded an opportunity to participate in clinical research, it can be from a lack of education, a lack of access, there are many barriers that exist that are hindering people, especially underserved and underrepresented people, from participating in research. Serving the underserved, I would say that many people in my life have been underserved at some point in their life, including myself. So, as I was a mom at 19 years old, my son was on medicaid, I had WIC, I couldn’t afford, on my own, normal health insurance policies because I was a young mom. And so, during this process, I feel like I got secondhand everything, so even going to the physician’s office, you feel like you can only go to certain dentists and certain doctors and you receive certain medication because you’re categorized as an underserved person. The only way to help people advance is to literally help them go from that underserved category to a category of resilience and a category that says, “I have access to all the things equal to everyone else out here.” That’s what we call, health equality, which means everyone has equal access. Health equity, which means everyone has healthy lives and equal ways to get there.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I know what sets me apart. Is that, I do not have industry domain expertise and so many people look and say, “You’re in tech, you’re in biotech, you’re in healthcare, you’re in clinical trials,” we are categorized under various industries all of the time. For me, I have a nonlinear path that led me here and I believe it was a combination of all of my professional experiences and my life experiences that make me so unique and valuable here helping to craft Acclinate’s solution. NOWINCLUDED literally was created based on my lived experience, I believe that for way too long, industry has come into communities of color and hung up a flag and said, “We’re here to serve you,” with some short term initiative because you wanted people to show up and show out and then you were gone. You never actually invested in those people to help them have a sustainable, healthier life and so for me NOWINCLUDED is very simple, now is the time for people of color to be included in clinical research. My goal is to ensure everyone, number one, is educated in what clinical research is, understands that consumer products, makeup, acne products, all the things that we trust and use every single day were developed through a process: clinical research. And there are clinical trials that not only save your life, especially if you have a rare disease or some type of cancer, but could also add years to your life and save you money if you cannot afford the copays and the expensive medical bills. And so, I know that coming from a personal angle makes me, in this space, personally unique. It also makes our business solution unique. So NOWINCLUDED, being a community, was something I felt like I needed. So, as a young mom at 19, I had my son, and of course, he was hospitalized for a week after being diagnosed with asthma. He was given albuterol and two other prescriptions, and at that time, I had no idea what a clinical trial was, I had no idea that there was a process that myself or he or anybody in life could have been a part of to help develop this drug. It was unfortunate that albuterol is 47% less effective in African-Americans and 67% less effective in Puerto Ricans but it’s because they really couldn’t get enough representation in the clinical trials that were being done, oh and by the way, the FDA still approved the drug. So, here we are today, NOWINCLUDED being a place where you can be educated and you can be connected to a clinical trial near you. We know that, that makes us very unique because it was built through this personal connection. Also, in order to reach people I know that you need to have these trusted nodes within a community that we call, Activation Points. And so, I always joke and say, “For my family and me, if you want to get to me, number one way to get to me is through my son,” and you’re going to get to my son through his coach or through his soccer team. So this coach has the connectivity to not only parents, step-parents, blended families, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, all those people who support that child. And especially in a black community, we were raised by a village. It takes a whole tribe to raise a good child and so, a coach is just one example of a person we believe is trusted and we know that based on our personal living experience.
But what I would want people to know about our work that I don’t think they really understand is how personal the connectivity is from NOWINCLUDED to our lived experience. Being a minority from an underserved community, I would say we came into this work knowing who these activation points were standardly within the community. And so, this wasn’t just, you know, some kind of plan we had to hire consultants for and build a company. We really, truly built our company off of our lived experience.
What am I most proud of? I’m most proud to be a black woman in a white male-dominated industry and to have had an opportunity to bring along more black women in a white male dominated industry. And so, my personal mission was always to sew back into those people who have sewn into me and believed in the same and I know I get to see it every single day around me. Rosemary is our Head of Operations, we have Alysia Bradley who is my right hand person on our team, we have Dr. Camille Pope who serves as our Chief Medical Lead, and none of us could do any of this work without Joanice Thompson who is the heart and soul behind our company and we’re all black women. And so, it really is rewarding to know that we were able to build in scale together and to know these are relationships that existed prior to the professional experience at Acclinate.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
As a woman leading a business in a male-dominated tech industry, I am well aware of the challenges that women face in the workplace and in the boardroom. I’ve had both the privilege and the displeasure to sit alongside women with brilliant ideas for moving culture forward, only to be openly diminished. So, there have been many times where I’ve been at a table, and we have a new innovative approach to how we believe the industry should go about diversifying clinical research and people will give me the side-eye, they look at me crooked, and they say, “Who does she think she is? She doesn’t have 20 plus years of experience, she hasn’t worked for 5 pharmaceutical companies.” And though most women can say that they have been able to rely on an intimate circle of friends for trusted guidance and support, that encouragement isn’t necessarily available to me because I don’t have a bunch of friends that came from this industry. And so, I would say I continue to have to be resilient when pitching these new ideas and these new approaches. Also, because God gave me a gift of vision, sometimes I can see the plan and what needs to be done and all the moving pieces in between, and might not have the patience to document those things and put them on paper. Also, when going through this process, these things require funding, and so, it wasn’t until recently when the FDA said, “We’re going to take this guidance and we’re now going to move it from guidance to an actual mandate.” And so, I do believe that now, that there is an FDA mandate for people to actually have a diversity plan it will be a little easier because at least there is a business imperative for industry to have to make this change, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it gets easier sitting at the table with people who diminish your ideas or believe you still need to be validated.
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
Del and I often joke about which story we want to tell, sometimes I’ll give a story of me meeting him at the bus stop but the real story is this, for both of us, is not our first startup. So, my first business, Driven Solutions, actually, while Del was the Dean at Alabama A&M University, he was my client at my first startup, Driven Solutions. And so, over a period of time, Del kept seeing that I could get the job done and not only execute flawlessly but in a timely manner and so Del would joke that he had another business idea. Well, his other business idea was not formally a whole business idea, he had this business idea for like, having a company that was like a Trivago of clinical research, but he didn’t have any experience and neither did I at hosting that as a business. I am a person of faith, he and I prayed many nights about what we might want to do together, we knew that it was a good idea to work together. He had Acclinate Genetics as a formal entity for this first company and I talked him into dropping genetics. And so, here we had Acclinate, we weren’t really sure what exactly we were going to do with Acclinate but we knew we wanted to do something with our lived experience. And so, in 2018 we started ideating, in 2019 we started looking for office space because we knew the industry was almost ready for what we thought we wanted to offer and at that time it was more closely aligned with clinical trial recruitment, we are not a clinical trial recruitment company today and are not interested in becoming a clinical trial recruitment company because we understand that the early engagement matters the most. And so, here we are, 2023, we haven’t killed each other, and continue to thrive and scale our team, we successfully finalized a seed funding round, we raised 3.5 million dollars and we are off to the races. This has been the most rewarding and challenging life journey that I, personally, have experienced to date.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://nowincluded.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/now_included/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NOWINCLUDED/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@nowincluded