By Women · For Women

The Two of Us.

Sofrena was built by two women who spent their careers inside American healthcare — and then hit the years where healthcare stopped having answers for them. This is us.

Sheila Sullivan

Sheila Sullivan

Sheila spent years as a lead litigator and is licensed to practice law in three states, which is what happens when you simply cannot stop asking questions. She holds a JD, a degree in Japanese Studies, and a couple of decades of experience untangling risk and compliance for healthcare companies, governments, and Fortune 500s. She is also the author of several published books that will make you laugh out loud. (Results may vary. We like our odds.) Away from the work, golf, writing, and the piano have been her forms of wonder and release — as was stand-up comedy, which she performed in college before deciding to become a lawyer instead. Both professions involve working a tough room; only one of them lets you object. Her writing voice lives somewhere between Douglas Adams and Jane Austen, and so, frankly, does she.

Janine Brown

Janine Brown

Janine began her career as an engineer in medical device manufacturing — building the actual machinery of medicine — then became an attorney, then moved up into the machinery of American healthcare itself: national health plans, Medicare and Medicaid, the regulatory deep end, with leadership chapters at Oracle and Hewlett-Packard along the way. There are not many people who have understood healthcare as the person who builds it, the person who argues it, and the person who runs it. Janine is one of them. She is also a private pilot, a scuba diver, and a devoted collector of passport stamps, which makes her comfortable at quite literally any altitude. Her wit is dry enough to be classified as a fire hazard. (See: our origin story. The eyebrow is real.)

One lane · done right

How We Got Here

Between us, we've spent decades in healthcare — in courtrooms, in boardrooms, inside the health plans and agencies where the rules get written. We knew the system from the inside. And then perimenopause arrived, and we became patients — and discovered that knowing the system from the inside is no guarantee the system knows anything about you. We asked good questions. We got shrugs, pamphlets, and the occasional "that's just part of it."

You would think, after all these centuries, the world would have learned one simple rule: do not frustrate a woman in her menopause years. We took our frustration and built something with it.

Why Sofrena

Sofrena is the space we wished existed: a place to ask without embarrassment, to trust what you're told, and to come to understand yourself — with other women on the same road and the people studying it walking alongside. Stop guessing. Start knowing. By women, for women.

Read how we got our name

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