I strive to stay connected to others in meaningful ways. This was one of the driving forces behind how Voices With Vigor got started.
Bringing people together, collaborating, sharing stories and wisdom…
For free.
And with giveaways during the live shows.
Social media has been a big part of my network, but I always jump at the chance to meet others in person.
Which is what happened one day, not long ago, when Tayler Moore and I connected over coffee in Seattle.
After a vigorous conversation, we promised to stay connected and share ideas.
Almost an afterthought, I snapped this selfie of us squinting into the sun—yes, it’s not always raining in Seattle!
L: Weathervane with blue sky R: Susan and Tayler meet for coffee in Seattle (October 2025)
What I didn’t know then was that the magic was only just beginning.
I’ve invited Tayler to add her voice to Voices With Vigor’s growing collective with this guest post…
And, if you are a woman who is curious about FemTech, please complete her two surveys at the end of this newsletter (Spoiler alert: If you fill out both, your next coffee is on Tayler)!
Bridging Care and Innovation:
Why Women Deserve Better Than “Well-Being”
My name is Tayler Moore, and I’m a solo entrepreneur in Seattle devoted to building meaningful, human-centered innovation in FemTech and women’s health.
I work at the intersection of women’s health, behavioral science, and human-centered technology, a place that shouldn’t feel radical, yet somehow still does. My work rests on a simple conviction:
Innovation should adapt to the realities of women’s lives, not require women to adapt to the limitations of innovation.
My career has taken me unusually close to the frontier of science, close enough to see its brilliance and its blind spots. From that vantage point, one question has followed me everywhere:
What will my life look like 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now, and what am I doing today that will either support that future or quietly undermine it?
Most people assume that’s a lifestyle question. It isn’t. It’s a technology question.
When “Wellness” Complicates More Than It Helps
Every new solution we adopt shapes the arc of our lives. It either becomes a partner that strengthens our relationship with our bodies, or an intrusion that fractures our attention and distances us from ourselves.
The uncomfortable truth is this: When innovation isn’t built around real, root-level needs, it doesn’t solve problems, it multiplies them.
It demands your attention instead of giving it back.
It produces data instead of understanding.
It creates noise instead of insight.
It encourages performance instead of presence.
Innovation becomes extractive when it isn’t grounded in lived experience. It becomes one more system we must manage instead of a system designed to support us.
How I Met Dr. Baumgaertel — And Why It Mattered
I originally connected with Susan through LinkedIn, during a period when I was actively exploring the landscape of women’s healthcare online. Amid a sea of polished branding and performative “wellness,” Voices With Vigor stood out instantly, not because she was trying to be flashy, but because she wasn’t. She was one of the few voices willing to be vulnerable while building something in public. She wasn’t selling a persona; she was telling the raw truth.
Talking with Susan feels, in many ways, like speaking to a wiser, more clinical mirror. She articulates realities I’ve sensed but couldn’t always name, especially the moral injury that physicians carry while trying to care for people inside the constraints of the current American healthcare system. Every time she speaks to that conflict, I feel an overwhelming sense of validation wash over me.
What she describes in clinical care, I’ve seen echoed in the world of innovation. The same injury exists in the market: wellness technologies offering more data but no direction, more tracking but no transformation, more pressure but no actual support. We hand people information without giving them the infrastructure, or the context, to do anything meaningful with it.
And that’s where our worlds meet: in recognizing that both medicine and innovation are failing us in parallel ways, for the same underlying reason, the system was never built around real human needs.
The False Divide Between Medicine and “Well-Being”
This is why it has become essential, non-negotiable, to bridge the widening gap between clinical care and everything we casually categorize as “well-being.” Medicine and wellness were never meant to be separate worlds, yet we’ve have been forced to live in the space between them.
Tracking symptoms alone.
Researching options alone.
Managing hormonal shifts alone.
Carrying invisible burdens alone.
Women do not experience their lives in compartments, and neither should the systems built to care for them. Real progress demands an integration of the clinical, the technological, the behavioral, and the deeply human.
The First Technology We Ever Had
Progress doesn’t emerge from abstraction. It emerges from relationships; from sitting with each other, listening without the impulse to fix, and having real conversations that collapse the distance between our experiences.
Understanding is the first technology humanity ever had.
And it remains the most powerful one we keep forgetting to use.
What This Collaboration Is Really About
The goal of this collaboration, and the heart of our work, is to identify, articulate, and design for the real problems women face in daily life.
Not hypothetical challenges imagined in boardrooms, but the lived realities women navigate quietly and constantly.
Because life is not meant to be a slow descent into discomfort, depletion, or merely “getting through” the next transition.
Life is meant to be constructed — intentionally, intelligently, compassionately — around the needs that keep us grounded, capable, connected, and well.
Our work exists to honor those needs and to create solutions that help women not simply endure their lives, but inhabit them fully — with clarity, comfort, and dignity.
A Final Note — And an Invitation
As we continue this work, we want to understand this community not through assumptions, but through your real experiences. That’s why I’ve created a short, two-part survey, not to collect data for data’s sake, but to listen more deeply.
The first part asks about you: how you live, what your days look like, the rhythms and routines that shape your wellbeing.
The second explores how you manage daily life — the friction points, the invisible load, the realities you navigate quietly.
Your voice isn’t a data point; it’s direction.
Your experience isn’t a footnote; it’s evidence.
Your needs aren’t peripheral; they are the blueprint.
I’m profoundly grateful to learn from this community Dr. Baumgaertel has built with such integrity. Thank you for letting me be part of this mission, and for helping shape the future of women’s health in a way that finally reflects women’s lives.
🌟 Learn more about our next trio of remarkable guests on the Voices With Vigor home page.
🌟 Missed a live show? Catch the free on-demand video replay here.
