By: Sophia Friedman and Gabrielle Bunney, MD
Each year, Impact Engine selects key themes within Health Equity to focus on. These themes reflect areas with significant unmet need and high potential impact that are ripe for investment. We focus on solutions that strive to make access to healthcare more equitable to all, with a focus on populations that have historically struggled to receive equal access to care. One such area is women’s health. While women make up roughly 50% of the population, women often struggle to access healthcare services and face gender biases in healthcare settings, leading to poor health outcomes. This issue is especially acute within maternal health: maternal mortality is staggeringly high in the United States when compared to other developed countries. We wanted to better understand these trends, the systemic factors leading to inequalities in access to care, and how the private sector can play a role in addressing these challenges.
Maternal mortality, defined as deaths during pregnancy and up to 42 days postpartum, reached 23.8 per 100,000 pregnancies in the US in 2020. The US now ranks last overall among industrialized countries in terms of maternal health outcomes. While the topic of maternal mortality has often been overlooked in the US, the Supreme Court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade has brought more widespread attention to the issue. Some worry that the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade could worsen maternal health outcomes and exacerbate health inequalities in the US, making the need for innovation in this space all the more critical. While the statistics are grim, women’s health, and maternal health specifically, is an area that investors are increasingly beginning to explore to fund solutions that close the gap between the US maternal mortality rate and the rest of the world.
The medical causes of maternal mortality are multifaceted, ranging from hemorrhage, infection, hypertensive disorders, cardiac conditions and others. While some disorders are unavoidable, many complications can be addressed by providing women with early access to care. Screening and early monitoring can help detect hypertensive disorders and cardiac conditions and also reduce C-sections. However, prenatal care is not just about showing up for visits. While the US standard of prenatal care dictates that 12-14 visits are required, we know that women who are uninsured or are on Medicaid are more likely to attend less than 10 prenatal visits. This leads to the conclusion that attending more visits must therefore be better. However, our European counterparts have better maternal outcomes and average recommending nine prenatal visits, significantly fewer than the US recommendation. Therefore, impact will not only come from getting women to attend appointments, but also from examining the quality of care that is delivered in -- and between -- those visits.
While medical causes have often been the focus, morbidity and mortality also stem from other causes, including mental health and the social determinants of health. These require a focus on multidisciplinary care, going beyond the health care provider and including those in the mental health professions, social work, dieticians, doulas, midwives and more. One argument for the success of prenatal care in Europe is that women have more social support and financial benefits, suggesting that a more integrative approach to care may be important.
Racial disparities account for a large portion of the maternal mortality rate. Black women have a much higher mortality rate when compared to women of other races in the US. Black women receive less prenatal care as they are less likely to initiate care, less likely to access timely and affordable care, and less likely to utilize care by the end of pregnancy.
The key social factors that impact maternal health outcomes include income, lack of social support and child care, food instability and education, all of which disproportionately affect black women. While these are important drivers, a greater emphasis needs to be placed on culturally competent care. When providers understand the background of the patients they care for, it allows for them to build trust, leading to a therapeutic relationship and ultimately better care.
Rural areas are also plagued by high maternal mortality. Approximately 15% of annual US births occur in rural hospitals, and rural communities have higher maternal and infant mortality than the national average. Overall there is a shortage of providers in rural areas and births are primarily attended by a family practice physician or midwives, rather than an obstetrician-gynecologist.
It is important to note that Medicaid covers about 50-60% of rural births. Medicaid is an important source of insurance for pregnant women regardless of their location. Insurance status is often linked to employment, and women who are expecting are less likely to be employed during the year they are pregnant. Public insurance is therefore an integral factor for pregnant women. Having coverage by public insurance was associated with a lower likelihood of spending >10% of their income and reducing the economic burden on pregnant women. However, women who do not normally qualify for Medicaid lose their Medicaid insurance 60 days postpartum. Medicaid expansion is done on a state-by-state basis, and therefore solutions that can solve this gap are greatly needed, in addition to lobbying for policy change.
Maternal health is a subset of the broader women’s health and femtech1 categories, which are experiencing significant growth. Some estimate that the women’s health market will be approximately $60 billion by 2027. Specifically, the current challenges in maternal health make this an area that is ripe for investment. In examining the landscape of digital health products addressing women’s health, approximately 19% are in maternal health. Overall, femtech investments are also rising, with increasing capital and an increasing number of deals. There was a notable increase in 2021 in the amount of VC capital that was raised – Impact Engine portfolio company Elvie raised $97M, Maven Clinic raised $110M and Flo Health raised $50M.
Startups in women’s health have been primarily divided between devices, diagnostics, and digital solutions. We focused on digital solutions because that is our primary lens on investing in this space. Digital solutions span online community resources, telehealth, and remote monitoring. Key themes of focus within the maternal health space include:
Software solutions that help to educate and engage women of reproductive age, specifically those who may soon become pregnant or who already are pregnant. Focusing on women who may soon become pregnant is critical, as often women have undiagnosed pre-existing conditions, and improving the health of women before they become pregnant or early on in the pregnancy is critical to improving health outcomes throughout the pregnancy and beyond.
Solutions to pair pregnant women with additional support services such as doulas, midwives, nutritionists and mental health professionals. Given current labor challenges, it will be important for these solutions to also focus on increasing the supply of such professionals, which has a dual impact of increasing economic opportunity while improving health outcomes.
Remote patient monitoring solutions that can be used in the home. These solutions, some of which integrate innovative devices and hardware, can bridge gaps in care as they can aggregate data and take a woman’s vitals (e.g., weight, blood pressure, and even fetal monitoring) to monitor women between visits and escalate issues as they arise, rather than waiting for a regularly scheduled check-up.
While point solutions can target specific parts of the patient journey, it is important to keep in mind the holistic health of the woman throughout the entire process when considering solutions in this space. We believe that the winners will be solutions that address the woman’s whole health and/or integrate with other solutions to support various social and medical factors that may affect a woman’s health throughout her pregnancy and beyond.
The increasing number of firms entering the women’s health space is encouraging. However, many solutions that target maternal health specifically are still early-stage and therefore have yet to show the correlation between the product or service and improved maternal health outcomes. It will be important to evaluate the impact that the solutions will have as well as women’s access to these services (e.g., via insurance coverage) in order for them to make lasting change and improve health outcomes. Hard questions need to be asked: How can we change the delivery of prenatal care to reduce the burden of receiving care? How can we provide culturally competent care to women? What outcomes should we be looking at e.g., reduced C-section rates, reduced preterm birth rates, reduced NICU days? How can we provide access in rural areas without compromising the quality of care? How can we reduce the cost burden on pregnant families beyond Medicaid expansion? These are a few questions that attempt to get at the core of the disparities that pregnant women experience in our current healthcare system and should guide the evaluation of new solutions.
1The femtech industry refers to a range of health software and tech-enabled products to improve healthcare for women across a number of female-specific conditions.
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Pitchbook data
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