Building Clinical Evidence Around Your Target Market: Interview with Teal Health CEO Kara Egan

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Kara Egan, founder and CEO of Teal Health.Teal Health is the company behind the first FDA-authorized at-home cervical cancer screening wand.Before founding Teal, Kara worked in healthcare and software investing at .406 Ventures and Emergence Capital, and held product and marketing roles at Zendesk and Stitch Labs.  In this interview, Kara discusses building support and follow-up into at-home screening, how Teal expanded its comparative clinical study to support broader market adoption, and how healthcare incentives, reimbursement, and institutional trust shape new care models.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device founders and CEOs and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.And if you’re ready to level up your medtech game, you should check out Medsider Courses — 8-week masterclasses covering topics like fundraising, M&A and exit planning, design and development, clinical and regulatory strategy, and commercialization.These courses, featuring hard-earned lessons from elite medtech CEOs, can be purchased individually or come free with our All-Access Pass.If you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Kara Egan, which includes a link to ScottBot — an AI version of host Scott Nelson trained on every Medsider interview and playbook. Feel free to ask ScottBot any questions you'd like!KEY MOMENTS FROM THE INTERVIEW(02:49) - Kara’s background in health technology investing and software that shaped Teal’s consumer-first approach (05:14) - How Teal turned the traditional Pap smear into the first FDA-authorized at-home screening product (07:30) - Turning at-home testing, telehealth, and clinician follow-up into a single care experience (13:48) - Raising Teal’s first $1M with mockups and consumer-grade design (22:17) - Teal’s comparative study that matched physician-collected screening with 96% sensitivity (23:40) - How asking women what they actually wanted changed Teal’s view of the market opportunity (32:05) - “Take off the healthcare hat” — Kara’s framework for fundraising, incentives, and commercialization (41:48) - What investors actually care about beyond the company’s mission