Lauren

Our world is facing a maternal health crisis. 

Globally, 800 women die each day due to a pregnancy related complication. This maternal mortality ratio (MMR) is equal to 223 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. The UN Sustainable Development goal has a target of reaching less than 70 deaths per 100,000 live births by 2030. 

Additionally, maternal morbidity - the breadcrumbs of a complicated pregnancy, continues to go untreated. For example, there are 600 million women with or at risk for hypertension around the world. This impacts the health of the pregnant mom, newborn, and risk of heart disease of the mom. 

The common theme for our solution has us focusing on producing healthier moms through improving high blood pressure control from pregnancy and beyond.

The Lauren Patient Navigator System is a consumer app and Community Network SaaS portal that supports women at risk of high blood pressure, mental health conditions and diabetes - from pregnancy and beyond. Lauren members use the application to manage their health goals and get direct access to needed resources. Clinical insights and health equity gaps are shared with their existing digital care village (e.g., physicians, doulas, community health workers) in real-time. Lauren has the unique ability to serve as a digital front door for community-based health organizations, health systems, health plans and aligned medical device companies who desire to illustrate sustained health improvements with women from pregnancy and beyond.

Lauren is primed to revolutionize pain as a predictor of maternal health outcomes – facilitating a reduction in maternal health deaths and morbidity, increase in trust between patient and provider and long-term improvement of healthy aging for all women. 

The market for digital health platforms is large. Our value overlaps with the maternal health vertical, maternal mental health, women's diabetic health and hypertension management. If we just look at hypertension - in the US alone, there are 11.2 million women with or at risk for hypertension within the childbearing age range. Globally, that number is 600 million women.

Health Evolve is also keen on directly addressing the growing maternal care deserts. In these communities - women do not have access to a birthing clinicians and may have to drive at least 1 hour deliver their baby. We understand that technology, alone, will not close the maternal gap. As such, we have build strategic relationships that align a public health strategy alongside our innovative solution to reach those who need the support most.

Our entire team is both diverse and fully immersed in medical care, advocacy, community health system leadership or research that directly touches the most vunerable of birthing people. 

As an African-American female Founder with extensive leadership experience in healthcare, I have my own lived experience that puts me at the center of the problem. In March 2012, I suffered from a life-threatening hypertensive disorder of pregnancy, HELLP Syndrome, and lost my daughter Lauren Kelly in the process. 

Losing Lauren Kelly shifted my path from hospital leadership to global health equity.  Her legacy is forever tied to mine – specifically relating to my vision of impact. I am both grateful for my life (survival) and committed to saving lives. Women are dying unnecessarily. As I began to build relationships with maternal health researchers and advocates around the world, I recognize that no one has found the silver bullet. Our collective efforts are essential to changing the narrative for future generations. 

While I have 18 years of executive leadership experience, I spent 11 of those years as an advocate in maternal and child health. In fact, my team of experts (e.g.: physicians, bio-behavioral researchers and engineers) is 100% African American and we each have a story that connects us with this work. Dr. Jandrette Rhoe is an African-American female, board-certified family physician with 25 years of direct care- primarily in rural South Carolina. Quantrilla Ard, PhD is an adjunct professor at Morehouse School of Medicine with a speciality in prenatal and perinatal biobehavioral research. Our development team is made up of three African American males who each have a traumatic birth story from a close loved one. This gives us an advantage in our approach to building a solution with a human centric design. We are a part of community networks and spend time with our target population of women continuously. We are also expanding our reach to the United Kingdom, and have already begun building relationships in London to further explore partnership opportunities and ways to deploy Lauren in a UK environment.

The design of Lauren was and continues to be done so through our network of community-based partners and academic practitioners who closely work with our target population. We also conduct informal focus groups and innovation chats with birthing women and birthing professionals to understand their greatest concerns and reconcile our value proposition of the tool. 

Our team has built Lauren 1.0 (our minimal viable product). We are in the midst of working on three pilots:

1. Traditional OB/GYN Practice Pilot

2. Traditional Family Medicine Practice Pilot

3. Community Based Program Pilot

Our traditional OB/GYN practice pilot is being conducted through a partnership with USC School of Medicine Greenville and Prisma Health. We are going through the due diligence process and working through IRB approval for 1 of 2 studies. The first study is set to validate the additional of a clinical risk score algorithm.

Our traditional family medicine practice pilot is being conducted with Wellspring Family Medicine. We are targeting at least 50 women who have high blood pressure and who have given birth between 1 and 3 years. Our goal is to get their blood pressure within control within 6 to 12 months of the pilot.

Our community-based program pilot is being conducted with SC Office of Rural Health Family Solutions. We are targeting 50 of their healthy start program participants in a maternal care desert. These participants would be pregnant or within 18 months of delivery and are receiving in home visits from a community health worker. Our goal is to get their blood pressure within control, as with the Wellspring Family pilot.

We have been very fortunate to have built an organization that attracts brilliant and passionate experts. As we prepare to go to market, we still face challenges that we believe the Solve program can help is navigate around.

1. Market Barriers: Our team is worked diligently to build a solid business model as a social impact organization. We still can't help but acknowledge the incredible social impact tech firms who have had to close their doors at a Series C round because they could not close the next round of funding. These or extremely successful organizations whose impact supported several hundred thousand individuals globally. As such, we went to launch with our eyes wide open and need support to map out a solid plan. 

2. Financial Barriers: Our team has been able to build up our tool and gain exciting traction without exchanging cash for equity so far. As we prepare for launch, we need both non-dilutive and possibly dilutive cash to extend our runway. We also want to talk through our financial strategy to overcome the long business development process for enterprise clients. Perhaps it would be best to target smaller community-based partnerships at first. That is some of the feedback and guidance we are seeking through the Solve program.

3. Technical Barriers: Lastly, we are building with the globe in mind. We do want feedback and the ability to pilot a Lauren Chat version for European and African markets.

We have developed a platform/device/process that can monitor women’s maternal health in real time using clinical and social insights to mitigate risks and improve the longterm health of women. All of this taking place in the comfort of their home - and on a smart device.

Our novel approach is the first of its kind to place women at the center of their own health ecosystem. Leaning on advances in technology, this approach gives postpartum women more control of managing their care at home and dramatically shifts how care providers can monitor and react to patient-provided data. Although there are an overwhelming number of patient stories that associated a lack of their pain being taken seriously and ultimately leading to an adverse postpartum health outcome, there are limited patient-centered approaches to interventions that link patient provided data improving maternal health outcomes. 

What if we could reduce poor health outcomes for women during the critical postpartum period? What if you could improve access to personalized and equitable care, and in turn reduce rates of health disparities?  

Today, a woman is 50% more likely to die from pregnancy than her mother. Black women are 3.5 times more likely to experience adverse outcomes (e.g., 69.9 compared to 26.6 deaths per 100,000 live births) associated with birth than any other race. 

Unfortunately, access to personalized and equitable care is not in reach for all American moms.  This is evident in the finding that 40% of moms miss their postpartum checkup and 1 in 4 American moms return to work within 2 weeks of giving birth [ACOG May 2018]. In addition, in rural America, birthing units of hospitals and birthing centers are closing at an alarming rate – and result in what we call maternal care deserts. This means that women in rural areas may be required to drive 1 to 2 hours to seek prenatal and postnatal care, making their decision or ability to make that drive a matter of life and death.

If we succeed, Lauren would help pregnant and postpartum women get their blood pressure within control and lower their risk factors for diabetes and chronic stress. By doing so, we would increase access to care through digital support for women in rural communities. As such, we would reduce maternal mortality rates and reduce the onset of heart disease.

Our overarching impact goal is to improve the health and well-being of 1 million women. We intend to measure this through the following key performance indicators:

1. 75% or higher improvement in blood pressure control

2. 50% activation of therapy resource for members showing high stress indicators

3. Lauren platform rolled out in at least 50% of US maternal care deserts

4. Lauren platform rolled out in UK, Europe and Africa

Lauren is comprised of a user-facing application and SaaS client portal. The user app contains SMS functionality, conversational AI/chat, machine learning and API connections for bluetooth enabled medical devices (i.e.: blood pressure cuff).

The client SaaS portal captures all the clinical and social insights from the user app. It also contains a PowerBI dashboard that is customized to the organization.

We have 11 team members.

Fulltime - 

1. Kimberly Smith (Founder and CEO)

Contractors-

2. Quantrilla Ard, PhD (Director of Research)

3. Justin Devine (Software Engineer)

4. Trevon Sutton (Software Engineer)

5. John Whitten (Brand Manager/UX Design Lead)

6. John Sims (Social Media Manager)

7. Melissa Hinton (Executive Assistant)

8. Dr. Jandrette Rhoe (Chief Medical Officer/Advisor)

9. Chemere Davis, MBA (Chief Product Officer/Advisor)

10. Terrell Smith, MBA (Chief Financial Officer)

11. Tayah Anderson (Marketing Intern)

We launched Health Evolve in January 2023. While we are a young company, we have made substantial progress. Prior to launching, I served in healthcare leadership for 18 years. Eleven (11) of those years were devoted to maternal health and child health advocacy. So even though we started building the solution last year, the research and advocacy work has been happening for over a decade to prepare us.

As a new organization, it is important that we build a foundational vision that attracts the right team members. Our focus on health equity and improving maternal health outcomes has attracted each team member and board advisor. As such, our team reflects the following diverse demographics:

- 100% African-American core operations team

- 54% Women

- Education Levels: From college student to Medical Physicians and Doctorate Researchers

Our business model is B2B2C (business to business to consumer). We partner with health plans and hospitals to purchase the user license so they can directly engage with their beneficiaries and patients. The cost is $10 per member per month (or $120 per year).

We are strategically targeting markets in the Southeast for our immediate go to market strategy. Our existing partnerships are in South Carolina. We are targeting regions with high rates of hypertension, diabetes and mental health challenges. We are also targeting health system partners who have large women’s health and obstetric care services lines. In the US alone, there are 11.2 million women with or at risk for hypertension within the childbearing age range. Our service addressable market is over $2 billion annually.

Our financial sustainability plan includes non-dilutive grants, federal contracts and subscription licenses of our Lauren platform.

We have already received over $100k in non-dilutive funding and support. We are also keen on obtaining an SBIR Phase 1 grant (valued at $300k) as well as an ARPA-H grant (valued at $3million). In addition, as we work to launch Lauren, we will hit $1million in revenue once we obtain 8,335 annual members.