The United States is facing a maternal mortality crisis. Maternal mortality rates in the US exceed rates in other high income countries (by more than ten times in some cases, such as compared to Australia, Japan and Spain). Specifically, Black women are most negatively impacted and are 3-4x more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications. Further, 15% of Black births are premature, 35% of Black births are via c-section, and Black women are twice as likely to experience pregnancy-related complications. Various factors drive this inequity in care including access to care, social determinants of health (SDoH), and structural racism. Notably, structural issues such as implicit biases of caregivers and a lack of cultural competency materially contribute to these outcomes.
Solution
Mae Health is a culturally competent digital health platform connecting Black expectant mothers with critical resources to elevate the standard of care for Black women, with a focus on improving maternal health outcomes. Mae works in concert with healthcare payers and states to address the significant disparities in maternal health outcomes for Black mothers across the country by pairing a community-based model of doula support with best-in-class digital interventions.
Mae’s core offerings include continuous digital engagement and culturally aligned support. The continuous digital engagement provides multi-modal touchpoints such as culturally aligned content, virtual, small group ‘Mae Momma classes’ that offer programming on specific topics, SDoH monitoring, care flags to identify risks early and track data, and analytics to share with healthcare providers and payors. Mae’s culturally-aligned support offers virtual or in-person perinatal support from credentialed doulas. Mae connects expectant mothers with doula networks for the provision of care and also provides various levels of support to doulas including a client management interface, workflow tools, and billings and claims submission support.
Why We Invested
We believe that Mae’s approach is unique as it is entirely focused on reaching Black expectant mothers, and their sales traction to date has been 100% with Medicaid payors (though the company does have D2C users who can access free content). Some competitors have avoided contracting with Medicaid payors because of the complex reimbursement dynamics that vary by state, and inherent challenges to engaging these patient populations, but Mae has tackled this head-on and is a first mover in this space. Mae has proven a strong value proposition to payors by clearly mapping the cost savings of providing doula support and has seen great success with signing and launching new Medicaid payor contracts in recent months.
Further, the doula-centric approach is also unique, and Mae has made progress ahead of other players in building out a bench of doula talent. While there are several players in the maternal health market broadly, Mae’s approach is unique in its focus on optimizing doula benefits for Medicaid populations. Doula support has been directly linked to improved health outcomes as women who give birth with a doula present have a 22% lower risk of undergoing a c-section. By employing this model, there is significant impact potential in a market that not many companies have been willing to focus on. Lastly, the team is extremely impact motivated and brings relevant lived experience to the platform. Founder and CEO Maya Hardigan has prior experience on the innovation team at Pfizer and as the mother of three young girls, she has personally experienced the inequities that she is trying to address.
Impact
Mae aims to elevate the standard of maternal health care for Black women, with a focus on improving maternal health outcomes. Believing that many of the disparities Black women face are driven by biases in care, its model prioritizes on-the-ground support from community-based doulas who are known to improve pregnancy experiences and outcomes. Mae has already begun to demonstrate improvements, and its solution is linked to reduction in maternity cost of care, improvements in health performance metrics (HEDIS metrics), and enhanced member literacy, satisfaction and engagement. From an access perspective, at the time of investment, Mae’s enterprise users were 100% Medicaid patients, and several quantitative measures suggest that the approach is driving positive health outcomes amongst this population. Specifically, Mae has shown a 31% reduction in c-section rates and a 58% reduction in preterm birth rates amongst its users.
While not specific to Mae, many of the tactics Mae is employing have demonstrated a direct link to an improvement in clinical outcomes. For instance: women who attend a childbirth education classes are 26% more likely to have a vaginal delivery than those who do not; women who have a birth plan are 98% more likely to have a vaginal delivery than those who do not; and, mothers who use a lactation consultant are almost 71% more likely to exclusively breastfeed within the first month of the baby’s life. Thus, with time, Mae expects to collect additional data to prove its positive impact on health outcomes.
Our investment in Mae Health was part of a fundraising round led by Jumpstart Nova.