When personal experience meets professional expertise, transformative healthcare solutions are born. This is exactly what happened with Supriya Laknidhi, CEO and co-founder of Cerula Care, a pioneering virtual behavioral health platform supporting cancer patients through their treatment journey.
Building Bridges in Healthcare
With two decades of experience in healthcare, including leadership roles at United and Aetna/CVS Health, Supriya identified a critical gap in cancer care. Her company, Cerula Care, provides comprehensive virtual behavioral health support as an extension of oncology teams, addressing a need that affects over 85% of cancer patients.
“We provide a care team with virtual visits, inclusive of counseling, holistic health coaching, and psychiatry, very specific to people who are going through the cancer journey,” Supriya explains. The team receives referrals directly from oncologists and spends approximately an hour and a half with each patient monthly, focusing on understanding their emotional state and building trust.
“We’re really getting a sense of what their barriers are for optimal care,” she says, “and then we’ll work with them partly on the counseling and psychiatry as needed, but spend a lot of our time giving them the tools and skills to help alleviate the barriers.” The impact of their work resonates deeply with patients, as one member shared: “We helped her feel like a real person at a time in her life where she didn’t even have a sense of self.”
Personal Journey Shapes Professional Mission
Supriya’s path to healthcare innovation was influenced by both professional experience and deeply personal circumstances. As the mother of a child with autism and a daughter to aging parents, she witnessed firsthand how physical health challenges often intersect with mental health needs.
Early Foundations of Leadership
Supriya’s leadership journey began in a supportive household that fostered confidence and ambition. “I grew up in a house where my parents gave me all of the confidence that I ever needed in order to just go pursue whatever I wanted to pursue,” she reflects. As an only child, she was raised in an environment where excellence was expected and success was the only option. This foundation, combined with a strong emphasis on education, helped shape her future approach to leadership and innovation.
Navigating Career Challenges with Resilience
Like many leaders, Supriya’s career hasn’t been a straight upward trajectory. She describes careers as “jungle gyms” rather than ladders, acknowledging that not every situation will be the perfect fit. She recalls a particularly challenging time when a supportive executive left, leaving her innovative project without crucial backing.
The experience taught her valuable lessons about resilience and perspective. “When you’re facing a challenging part of your career, think about it as a point in time, and don’t make it a very personal thing,” she advises.
Balance and Well-being: A Leader’s Perspective
As a mother of two children, ages 10 and 8, Supriya emphasizes the importance of self-care in leadership. “If I’m not there for myself in the way that I need, it’s really hard for me to be amazing for others,” she shares. She maintains balance through running, which serves as her form of meditation, and setting boundaries between work and family time.
“Dinner time and bedtime, I still have young kids. I’m not checking email (but of course my team can reach me if absolutely needed). My team knows that. Weekends for the most part, same thing,” she explains. “Some of this is just being pretty strict about taking the time that you need for yourself and for your family.”
Breaking Stigmas and Creating Change
At Cerula Care, Supriya’s team is tackling the stigma around mental health through an innovative approach. By integrating behavioral health support into cancer treatment, they’re making mental health care more accessible and acceptable. “When someone is diagnosed with cancer… all of a sudden the stigma of having a mental health person in your team by your side decreases,” she explains.
This approach often serves as an entry point for broader mental health support: “What we’re finding is a lot of people do come in and then we know and they know that they probably should have had mental health services before. There’s probably underlying anxiety or depression that’s been there for a while and it’s almost like sometimes we’re their first door in and that’s okay.”
The Power of Mentorship
Early in her career, Supriya found inspiration in a female mentor who significantly shaped her professional journey. Working in banking in New York City, she encountered a remarkable woman leader who stood out in a male-dominated environment. “She was instrumental for me in my career going forward,” Supriya recalls.
“There were many times where she was able to be pretty honest with me if maybe a promotion didn’t happen because there’s inherent bias and how we can work through that and what we should do.”
This mentor not only provided professional guidance but also demonstrated how to balance a successful career with family life, serving as a powerful role model for Supriya’s own journey.
Inspiring the Next Generation
Drawing inspiration from her early career mentor, Supriya is passionate about supporting the next generation of women in healthcare. “Inspiring the next generation of women is one of the reasons I wake up every single day and come to work,” she shares. She emphasizes the importance of personal connections and leading by example, demonstrating that it’s possible to balance a successful career with family life.
Wisdom for the Journey
When asked what message she’d send to her younger self, Supriya offers wisdom that resonates with all healthcare leaders: “The career is long. Not every part of it is going to be amazing, but lots of it is going to be fantastic.”
She emphasizes that she’s still learning and growing, noting that as a first-time founder, “I am my younger self all over again, doing something for the first time and learning every single day.”
Her final piece of advice encapsulates her leadership philosophy: “Handle everyone that you work for with grace and respect and be true to who you are and connected with them. That makes a career wonderful even through the jungle gyms of a career.”
Through her leadership at Cerula Care and her commitment to breaking down barriers in healthcare, Supriya Laknidhi exemplifies the perseverance and innovation that drive positive change in the healthcare industry.