Revolutionizing Maternal Healthcare with Oula Health
Today, modern maternity center Oula Health announces their $3.2M Seed round with investors including Female Founders Fund, Collaborative Fund, Chelsea Clinton’s fund Metrodora, 8VC, Kapor Capital, individuals like Kate Ryder of Maven Clinic, among others.
Female Founders Fund has always believed in the opportunity to transform women’s healthcare by building the care model around the mother’s needs. We got excited about the team at Oula Health for a few reasons:
1⃣ Firstly, experience. It is so rare to come across a founding team with both the healthcare expertise as well as the technology background in scaling care teams with start-up experience, as well as healthcare investing experience. Adrianne Nickerson, a second-time health tech founder, and Elaine Purcell, a former health plan and care delivery executive, had both.
2⃣ Secondly, consumer behavior. Not only were we seeing and hearing anecdotally that more and more women were considering more holistic and alternative birthing options, but over the summer, we spoke with two female VC’s who were doing home births — an interesting trend.
3⃣ Lastly, as investors in Maven Clinic, we have seen first hand that the U.S. has a long way to go in improving maternal care rates with the highest maternal mortality rate of any highly developed nation.
For all these reasons, we are thrilled to back Adrianne & Elaine’s vision and approach to create a holistic and patient-forward model for maternal healthcare, and support their journey building Oula. Read our full interview with the co-founders below.
Adrianne and Elaine, tell us a little about your backgrounds. Why are you the right founders to revolutionize maternity healthcare?
We started Oula after a collective two decades of healthcare experience. We’ve worked for established players and new startups, and have seen firsthand how building better care experiences can be a win for everyone — hospital, health insurers, and most importantly, the consumer. For Oula, we are bringing together Adrianne’s experience in using technology to scale the impact of care teams and Elaine’s background building care models that treat the whole person.
What was your inspiration for starting Oula Health? Any personal experiences to share?
Like many women in their 30's, we were starting to plan for kids and trying to figure out how to balance that with the rest of our busy lives. We turned to our friends who had already navigated the terrain and were pretty disappointed to learn about their experiences. We expected pregnancy to be this exciting and hopeful time, and yet we kept hearing women describe how isolating it felt and how unprepared they were for childbirth and postpartum.
After having spent time rebuilding the care experience in oncology and primary care, it seemed obvious to us that there had to be a better way. We selfishly wanted to build a better experience for ourselves but also wanted it to be something that improved the experience for all women. After months of research and conversations, we realized the answer required rebuilding maternity care from the ground up. Women needed a collaborative care team that actually listened to what was important to them and they needed support that focused on their wellbeing as much as their babies.
How are you looking to improve and change the current status quo for maternal care?
Maternity care is not designed for the unique needs of pregnant individuals. It is siloed, formulaic, and one-size-fits-all. The way we deliver prenatal care hasn’t changed since WWII. We are long overdue for an update that reflects the needs of a modern woman. Of course women want great prenatal care, but they are also more attuned to their broader emotional and physical health — from postpartum depression to pelvic floor rehab, women are looking for an integrated and holistic approach that doesn’t exist today. Instead women are forced to pick between a heavily medicalized experience in a hospital with an obstetrician, or a “natural birth” at home with a midwife, neither of which fits their multidimensional needs. Women deserve another safe choice that blends the best of both options, and that is what we are building at Oula.
Where in the motherhood journey would a woman access care from Oula? What is your current scope of services, and what are you looking to add in phrase two?
Our services are designed to support women from their positive pregnancy test through postpartum. We offer both telehealth appointments and in-person care so that we can support women in ways that are convenient and accessible. The Oula app helps women navigate key decisions, build their prenatal care plan, and message their care team. When we open our prenatal care clinic in early 2021, we’ll focus on hospital-based delivery; later in 2021 we will also deliver in Oula-owned birth centers to offer women an additional option for personalized care.
In the United States, Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native women are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, as reported by the CDC in 2019. How are you thinking through maternal care for women of color?
Atrocious maternal health disparities were a major factor in choosing New York as our first market: while black women are 3x more likely to die in childbirth than white women nationally, they are 12x more likely in New York. This is unacceptable in a city with its level of wealth and healthcare resources. These disparities are associated with poor access, a lack of communication, and frankly respect for women of color.
The beauty of the midwifery model of care is that it focuses on a wider variety of issues — both clinical, and psychosocial — with appointments that span a longer period of time to engender trust and conversation between the patient and provider. To further combat racism within maternity care, we’re heavily focused on hiring a diverse team, developing anti-racist materials as well as different types of measurements for ourselves to ensure all patients, but especially women of color, are treated with compassion and dignity.
Oula Health has developed an all-star team of OB/GYNs, midwives, doulas, lactation counselors, among other specialists. How have you gone about building your team of maternity clinicians?
First and foremost, we needed a team of great clinicians. Women are trusting us with a really important moment in their lives and they need to trust that they are in safe hands. We looked at clinical credentials, peer recommendations, patient reviews, and used our team of clinical advisors to vet everyone we brought on board. We also made sure there was a cultural fit. We are changing how care is delivered and we needed obstetricians and midwives that were committed to designing care around what our patients need, not just how things have been done before. Finally, it was critical to build a team with diverse perspectives that could help us shape a care experience that was non-judgmental, safe, and inclusive.
Throughout your fundraising journey, you had a lot of interest from notable investors, including Chelsea Clinton’s new venture fund, Metrodora, as well as individuals in the healthcare space like Kate Ryder of Maven Clinic. Can you share a bit about your fundraising journey, and why it was so important for you to have a diverse cap table?
Building any business takes a village. We wanted to bring together a syndicate who complemented our skills as founders and would support us in building a mission-driven company. We have healthcare experience in spades so it was really important to bring around us great consumer investors like Female Founders Fund and Collaborative Fund as we built the brand. Similarly, we believe all women deserve access to great maternity care and feel lucky to have investors that are aligned with that mission, in particular Kapor Capital and Metrodora. Finally, it is so important to be able to leverage the experience of amazing operators like Kate Ryder, Tom Lee, and Jonathan Bush as we look to tackle the challenges of building a scalable services business.
Oula’s modern perinatal clinic is slated to open in Brooklyn Heights in early 2021 — so exciting! As we continue to move through the realities of our post-COVID world, how are you thinking through virtual as well as IRL opportunities of care?
COVID has spiked women’s interest in virtual care but has also impacted how they view laboring at hospitals. There is a new awareness that hospitals are not always the safest place for healthy pregnancies. As we make decisions on how to support women post-COVID, the most important thing we keep in mind is that not all women are going to want the same thing. Some women may want to limit in-person visits and we can support that through a comprehensive virtual platform with remote monitoring. For other women, face-to-face care is still a top priority and so we have strict protocols in place for our clinic to keep women and their partners safe. Finally, we are opening a birth center next year to give women an alternative to hospital deliveries.
What is your vision for Oula Health over the next 5 years?
We want to help the whole industry progress so that the Oula way of delivering care becomes the new standard that all pregnant individuals can expect regardless of whether or not they are in a city with an Oula clinic. Key to making this happen will be partnering with large health systems and health insurers that influence care across the country. We firmly believe the fastest way to change care is by aligning incentives across consumers, insurers, and providers. We are in the midst of these conversations right now and are excited to push them forward over the next 5 years.
Learn more about Oula Health at www.oulahealth.com.
