Coralai Collaboration with LunaJoy Offers a New Coordinated Care Experience for Clients
A Q&A Bulletin Feature by Kate Schwab
Board-certified psychiatrist Dr. Sipra Laddha elaborates on the shared mission of LunaJoy and Coralai to provide holistic resources and solutions with accessibility, affordability and community as platform pillars.
LunaJoy co-founders Dr. Sipra Laddha and Dr. Shama Rathi are game changers in the world of women’s health. Precision digital health services is the name of that game. LunaJoy provides targeted psychotherapy, medication management, genetic testing, coaching, and holistic wellness services for every phase of a woman’s life, while Coralai’s platform enables a deeper understanding and care for their skin along the way. With a shared belief and ethos that skincare is linked to healthcare, this collaboration is something we want to celebrate.
We sat down with Sipra to hear her story and learn how the technology and medical staff LunaJoy brings together for clients is making waves. In fact, LunaJoy and Coralai are both proud members of the 2022 Tamba Bay Wave TechDiversity cohort. Readers are invited to dive into the Q&A below as the discussion swells with equitable holistic wellness and telemedicine topics.
KS: How did you get your start in the industry?
SL: Throughout my education and career, I have been dedicated to improving the lives of others. My background in psychiatry and deep interest and experience in women’s mental health has allowed me to support women through various life transitions, including pregnancy and postpartum.
I gained firsthand knowledge of the challenges women face in accessing affordable and convenient mental health care. I co-founded LunaJoy with these challenges in mind. A unique platform that improves access to affordable (in-network) high-quality therapy, medication, and mind-body interventions.
LunaJoy was the natural culmination of a career focused on helping others improve their lives.
KS: How will the collaboration with Coralai enhance the offerings available to LunaJoy clients?
SL: Our partnership makes the connection and shines a light on things that are often overlooked. For example, the way that people look in terms of their outward physical appearance and the changes they have going on with their skin absolutely affect their mental health and their emotional life.
It’s a mirror, really. A person’s mental health and emotional life is often reflected biologically and physiologically on their skin. It’s a symbiotic relationship. If someone feels more mentally well and emotionally happy, they are more likely to take care of their body, maintaining routine wellness, including taking care of their skin. On the other hand, if someone is looking and feeling well, attending to their physical needs, they’re also much more likely to want to follow through and take care of their mental health and emotional needs. I feel like they’re very synergistic.
With our newly formed collaboration, the licensed medical professionals on the LunaJoy platform can now refer clients/patients to the licensed skincare professionals and dermatologists on the Coralai platform, and vice versa.
We empower one another.
KS: What other roles or events have helped to get you where you are today?
SL: I have supported outpatient psychotherapy training, served as Chief Resident during my training at Emory, published in peer review journals, and advanced my knowledge and experience at every opportunity. As a board-certified psychiatrist, the insight and experience I have gained have been invaluable over the years.
We’re pleased to say, today our specialized workforce provides targeted psychotherapy, medication management + genetic testing, coaching, and holistic wellness.
KS: What are your areas of expertise? Specialties?
SL: From adolescence through menopause, we support women through their emotional challenges, allowing you to engage in other parts of your life with more joy and efficiency. Services and specialties include (but are not limited to):
– Maternal and reproductive mental health
– Postpartum depression and anxiety
– Parenting transitions
– Menopause counseling
KS: What is your wellness philosophy?
SL: Our philosophy centers around these sentiments: equitable living to the fullest, authentic conversations to achieve longevity, and holistic wellness support to feel mentally and physically unburdened.
Every woman should have access to the care she needs. We aim to make this possible and change the paradigm around it.
Self-care and therapy are not things you do only IF you have extra time or expendable income.. Wellness, mental health services and skincare practices should not be considered a luxury (only designed and marketed to some) akin to buying lattes or shoes. Certain products, classes, retreats, treatments and procedures can clearly be “extra,” but at the foundational level these rituals and routines are part of routine physical health and psychological self-care.
With our telemedicine platform, you spend less time commuting and waiting and more time engaged. And our ability to work with most insurance companies reduces the financial burden for patients who have previously seen cost as a barrier.
From the time you take for yourself at home to what you prioritize in terms of healthcare services, it’s all part of the big picture in terms of human spirit and longevity.
KS: What do you feel is missing from the wellness conversation in terms of reaching those wellness clients and shoppers experiencing rapid hormonal changes associated with transitioning, pregnancy, menopause, oncology care, thyroid disease?
SL: One of the things that we see a lot — and is really the thesis for the Luna joy platform — is that even though these hormonal shifts, whether related to thyroid shifts, transitioning pregnancy or postpartum, the medical community (myself included being a medical doctor) does a good job studying the physiological changes, but doesn’t necessarily tie that into letting patients know what to expect emotionally.
Medicine is very pathology driven. We know how to screen for bad things in terms of prevention and create treatment plans once something is diagnosed, but many aren’t giving anticipatory guidance and setting expectations for those that might have a clean bill of health now … but what they could anticipate feeling or how their bodies might be changing as they approach a certain life stage.
With LunaJoy, we want to set the stage with patients prior to a hormonal shift. What someone could anticipate or symptoms that happen ‘normally,’ which may seem the furthest thing from normal to someone who is, for example, approaching perimenopause. We want to talk about what fierce expectations they may face while normalizing the paradigm to seek support even if nothing bad or horrible is happening. This, for many, goes beyond an annual wellness check.
What’s missing in the discussion about these life phases? Clearly stating that challenges (especially related to mental wellness) may not be pathological, but do influence quality of life and how people see and feel about themselves every day. Because even if it’s not cancer, it’s still important, right?
Our therapists are seeing this a lot. Even with pregnancy and postpartum, there are hormonal changes that are obviously predictable or “normal,” but there are feelings that go along with it. There’s thought processes and identity shifts, which can be really difficult and cause friction.
The bottomline, unless it’s pathology-driven, the medical community is not addressing it. The space is reserved to talk about cells, tumors and growth markers. Our clinicians aim to get to the heart of what may typically be overlooked and give credence and a voice to those seeking a holistic approach, flowing between medical and mental.
KS: What communities/organizations do you support who are helping to add to the conversation?
SL: Yes, Let’s Talk Menopause is one of our partners, and we’ve also done some events with them. They are a nonprofit invested in changing the conversation around menopause so women get the information they need and the healthcare they deserve.
Another organization we support is KindBody, which has an amazing mission. Their team unites around providing fertility and wellness services in modern, tech-enabled clinics. Best-in-class care, accessible pricing, and a seamless patient experience. Kindbody services range from fertility treatments, including IVF and egg freezing, to wellness, and LGBTQ+ care.
KS: What does the future hold for you? What are some of your upcoming projects? (personal or professional)?
SL: As we’ve learned through the pandemic, isolation is very part and parcel of emotional suffering and distress. That’s why soon we will be releasing groups. I think that there is so much power in the spirit of community, feeling heard and being joined by one another. This will be especially empowering for women to be with other women in their same life stage or dealing with kind of the same things, to be able to learn and heal not only from expressing themselves, but from hearing other people express themselves as well.
Additionally, we are putting an emphasis on having all of our providers trained in therapy. This is regardless of whether or not they’ll be doing talk therapy versus medication management.
LunaJoy will bring a therapy background into every single interaction that we have with someone on our platform. (Even if that’s not the original reason for their visit). This helps to build relationships, which is part of our structure as well. We don’t offer 10-min med-checks.
We’re hyper focused on the quality of the relationship between the patient and the client and the provider because we know that ultimately is what’s therapeutic and long lasting.
Also, I’m personally happy to share that I’m starting a new position as a Medical Advisory board member at BabyCenter.
It’s been such a pleasure. I look forward to working with Coralai and your clients, and we look forward to sharing about this collaboration with our staff and patients.
Don’t forget, for personalized psychotherapy and women’s mental health reimagined, send a message or visit us https://hellolunajoy.com