Neuemoon

Women's reproductive health advacement has been more focused more on obstetrics part than on disorders. Often times, when women display severe debilitating symptoms like fibroids and endometriosis, they are only told to take a pain killer or be put on birth control. For example, as high as 70% of patients believe that healthcare professionals have limited awareness of the impact of endometriosis, and also 42% of patients were told by their HCPs that their pain was simply "part of being a woman".

There are at least 200 million women worldwide with endometriosis and fibroids. These disorders cause them to miss school and work which affects them socio-economically and prevents them from being present with friends and family because they're chronically in pain, anemic, or maybe even unable to leave their house due to the heavy blood flow. It can take an average of 10 years to get the proper diagnosis for endometriosis and 3.6 years for fibroids, causing diseases to progress to the point of needing a hysterectomy or oophorectomy which puts women as early as their 20s in early menopause, or women missing the window of opportunity to have children. These health issues impact Black women disproportionally higher for fibroids and Asian women for endometriosis.

We empower young girls & women suffering from these conditions to live healthier lives and find the care they need sooner. In our research, oftentimes, girls get dismissed when talking about their abnormal menstrual pain or bleeding, so we approach this by building a mobile app to help them track their symptoms and tell them what to look out for. For example, many women don't know bowel discomfort could be related to endometriosis tissues being on the bowel. We'd then provide recommendations for the next steps and help them find the right doctors who are specialists for these conditions. The doctor's directory is built upon crowdsourcing from other patients who have gone through the same journey, and enriched by external data such as insurance claims data to specify, for example, how many laparoscopic surgeries or myomectomy surgeries certain doctors perform compared to their peers. 

We'll walk the patients through step-by-step how to approach their doctors to explain their symptoms and work with medical providers by integrating the health data from the patient. Also, because conditions like fibroids and endometriosis can re-occur even after surgeries, we'll help patients to integrate holistic care such as diet and exercise that improve their symptoms physically and mentally that work for them.

Also, with the data we collect based on patient's symptoms and how they react from different treatment options, we'll anonymize the data and, with the patient’s consent, work with medical research teams to find the cure for these conditions and advocacy groups to advocate for the government to allocate money into these conditions and to have better policies to help these women.

The solution serves girls and women with reproductive disorders. We'll start with the US first geographically and endometriosis and fibroids first, and then expand globally and potentially to other reproductive disease areas such as cancer and PCOS. For US population, I specifically want to serve Medicaid community because they are the most vulnerable and lack access to resources. For example, when searching for an endometriosis excision surgeon, I found that most of the specialists actually don't take health insurance or don't take Medicaid patients. This is beyond maddening because this population have jobs that are not as accommodating or more physically intensive, while they get the least help medically. As mentioned in other answers, the goal is to help them find access easily and not be dismissed, and also partner with public schools and healthcare clinics to offer courses to educate women. In the future, we'll work with advocacy groups and researchers to advance the policies and research.

I personally suffer from both fibroids and endometriosis, and it has taken me almost 20 years to find the surgeries I need to do and the doctors I need to see. As I'm doing more and more research and interviewing other women, it's the same story over and over again.

We have a doctor's directory using crowdsourced patient reviews on the website. And we're in the process of refining and inputting more doctors to make the directory more comprehensive.

10 people

First of all, I want to join a community that is trying to better the world and Solve is a program specifically for founders who try to do good. One of the things I struggle with is how to monetize to make the startup sustainable, and I think this is a common struggle for social impact founders. As someone from a non-healthcare background, I especially want to expand my network with healthcare professionals or healthcare founders to gain the expertise and access.

Currently, the only way for women to find the right doctors is through either word-of-mouth or joining Facebook support groups and ask fellow patients. And for tracking symptoms, unfortunately most apps are period tracking apps for fertility purpose, and even though there are some apps for endometriosis the UX is poorly designed, and the apps don't integrate into EHR, making it difficult to share data with providers.

This year, I'm launching a mobile app to start providing immediate impact for patients by educating them and providing them with recommendations. At the same time, I'm aiming to start working with medical providers to see what information they'd need to provide better care. Also, I'm refining the provider directory to include more doctors and more data for patients to make informed decisions. 

In the next five years, I'm hoping to connect with researchers in the endometriosis and fibroids space to provide them with meaningful and actionable data. And also, connect with advocacy groups and help them advocate for change with our data.

We'll measure the progress by tracking how many people could connect successfully with providers who can help them. We'll also track how many women are using the app consistently to track their symptoms and will provide mini-feedback loop for them to provide quick one-click feedback to see if the recommendations were helpful. We'll also get written/verbal feedback from both the patients and the providers if the app has made the care better. 

I've conducted user interviews with patients to understand the gaps within the current system. Based on the learnings, women want to know about their symptoms and how their bodies react to different treatment options or even lifestyle choices and be able to communicate them with their providers easily. and To be completely transparent, my research on the provider's side has been limited, and so I'm still trying to figure out how to integrate the patient's data into EHR, for example, or another way so they can provide better data-driven informed care.

There are two parts so far: a mobile app for tracking symptoms (dev still underway) and a web app for a doctor's directory (live). Both are done using low-code options. To accurately synthesize patients' data and, provide feedback & recommend next steps that are completely individualized, we'll need to integrate ML models to learn.

To ensure the quality of the product, we specifically look for women, and even women who have these conditions, to join the team. We also look for racial diversity as women of colors suffer from the worse quality of care than others.

The business model is a freemium model on the patient's side. Assuming at $ 7.99-a-month subscription model, if we get a 1% market share of the 21.5 million in the US alone, it'll be $1,806,000 in revenue. 

We'll be charging a marketing fee for doctors on the doctor's directory and also a monthly subscription fee for doctors to integrate patient's data into their system. Lastly, for research and advocacy groups, we'll provide anonymized data which can be maybe per API call or packaged data sale.

It'll be selling products and services. Also, we'll love to work with schools, insurance companies, and healthcare clinics to introduce courses to educate women.

I don't have any examples unfortunately because I've been self-funding this venture so far, but I've been looking into grants options and later on for angels investment.