MyLÚA Health.

Maternal care in the United States of America is in a time of continued crisis. Despite being one of the richest countries in the world based on GDP per capita, the United States has the worst maternal and infant health outcomes among developed nations, with a maternal mortality rate three times higher than the average OECD nation, based on most recent data. These outcomes are unacceptable.   

This crisis is particularly acute for Black and Brown mothers in the United States. Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than White women, Native American women are twice as likely, and Hispanic women are 1.5 times more likely. In New York City, Black women die at 9 times the rate of white women. This disparity is also unacceptable.

There are many factors that contribute to this stark inequity, but one of the key reasons is that both providers and health plans often lack the data they need to identify and address risks early on, before they become a major problem, before complications become costly. Social determinants of health, such as poverty level, education, and access to basic needs like housing and food play a significant role in creating better outcomes. Even though they are salient to uncover before crisis strikes, data shows that more than 80% of birthing individuals are not screened for these factors. 

Even if they are screened, there is a high probability that for Black and Brown people, traditional screening methods may not accurately depict what’s occurring, leading to missed or delayed diagnosis with detrimental consequences for both the birthing person and the health plan. This is due to symptom presentation for conditions like anxiety, depression, and more varying for people of color, but the standard of care, as well as the diagnostic protocol is still informed by data that underrepresented minority groups. This leads to incorrect or missed diagnoses for non-white patients in the U.S., and unacceptable maternal mortality and morbidity rates due to preventable underlying causes. 

MyLÚA Health has created the tools needed to reverse this trend, re-imagining maternal health care to truly meet its goal of providing a successful pregnancy and postpartum experience to all parents, regardless of background or income.

MyLÚA Health is a Black-owned AI care coordination solution for health plans that provides culturally congruent, engaging support to mothers and birthing people throughout their perinatal experience, from preconception through postpartum. 

Our solution integrates with existing health plans and partners with healthcare providers to offer a seamless experience for both patients and providers. We collect and analyze early risk data from a variety of sources, including electronic health records, claims data, and patient surveys. Machine learning techniques are used to use these data to develop predictive models that identify birthing individuals at risk for complications during pregnancy or postpartum, detecting postpartum depression risk with 94% accuracy as early as the first trimester. 

Parents will be paired with personalized education, health risk assessments, and resource matching depending on their needs as well as determined risk scores. Patient education is key to ensuring adherence to care plans and healthy behaviors, as well as advocating for their needs when problems or complications arise. By providing education with a focus on both mental health and cultural sensitivity/relevance, parents garner actionable insights and can make lasting behavioral changes. Content ranges from understanding the importance of each prenatal or postpartum visit, to information on common birthing complications and how to decrease personal risk, to ways for parents to make their voices heard during visits and during birth. Parents will also be referred to geographic-specific resources, from government and community services to mental health referrals in order to address psycho-socio-cultural needs while meeting parents where they are at. 

MyLÚA Health utilizes a spectrum of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, natural language processing, and predictive analytics. In addition to our risk model utilizing machine learning, our generative AI features allow us to expand our bandwidth to answer parents’ questions without high labor costs or sacrificing user experience. Moving forward, our machine learning models will expand to detect further risk, and AI to build a strong resource recommendation system, as we collect engagement and feedback data.  

Health plans will benefit through improved outcomes, afforded by early risk detection and education oriented towards actionable risk-reducing behaviors, as well as reduced costs, through automated data collection reducing their labor costs and expanding the bandwidth of case managers and providers. In the long term, MyLÚA will contribute to the first reduction in maternal mortality the United States has seen in nearly three decades. 

The historical mistreatment and exploitation of Black women in OBGYN procedures during slavery and the subsequent era of medical experimentation have contributed to a deep-seated mistrust of the medical system among the Black community. These unethical practices, such as the non-consensual surgeries performed by Dr. James Marion Sims on enslaved women, have left a lasting impact on the perception of medical care among Black individuals. This legacy of abuse and neglect has engendered understandable skepticism and apprehension towards medical institutions, leading to barriers in seeking timely and appropriate care. 

MyLÚA Health improves the quality of care Black and Brown birthing people receive, by prioritizing them; those who are disproportionately impacted by maternal mortality and morbidity. This population is more likely to experience complications during pregnancy and postpartum, less likely to have access to quality healthcare, and less likely to trust the system in which they need to receive care. This is due to history; racism, discrimination and the lack of access to culturally informed diagnosis and treatment.  

 It has been demonstrated that Black birthing people are more likely to experience dismissive treatment, inadequate pain management, and delays in receiving necessary interventions during pregnancy and childbirth, impacting outcomes. Implicit biases held by healthcare providers, influenced by societal stereotypes and prejudices, can also contribute to these inequities in care delivery across the continuum. By acknowledging this, we can work towards dismantling systemic barriers and promoting equitable care for all individuals.

A 2022 CDC report states that 80% of maternal deaths are preventable, with 25% attributed to mental health issues. Many birthing people of color, ethnic minorities, and low-income birthing people have limited access to healthcare or do not seek help for their mental health or physical health symptoms.  Moreover, the 5-year financial burden of untreated perinatal mood and anxiety disorders in the U.S. is approximately $14 billion, with roughly 134K birthing people being untreated annually. Postpartum depression (PPD) is well known as a severe maternal health concern and has a reported occurrence rate of 20% among new birthing individuals.  While there are numerous reports that highlight the importance of investigating the onset of depression during pregnancy, mental health remains one of the leading complications amongst pregnant and postpartum birthing people and disproportionately impacts people of color, which is why MyLÚA Health’s predictive model starts with maternal mental health and will later expand to other conditions. Our solution prioritizes patients' needs by meeting them where they are at, connecting them with resources to mitigate these rising risks ranging from government resources to community services, and other referrals, on-time and consistent mental health screening through surveys, and early risk detection.

In order to properly address these disparities, the implementation of culturally inclusive care guidelines and education, and the creation of equitable access to quality prenatal and postpartum care, like mental health screenings are essential. Community engagement initiatives that promote awareness, empower individuals to advocate for their own health, and foster trust between healthcare providers and the Black and Brown communities are also crucial components. 

The MyLÚA Health team is uniquely positioned to deliver this transformative solution due to our deep connections to the communities we serve. Our CEO, J’Vanay Santos-Fabian, is a maternal health equity advocate with a personal mission to reduce discrimination, disparity, and systemic racism in healthcare. As a Black and Latin American woman, she has experienced the challenges and inequities faced by marginalized communities firsthand. Her journey through higher education, culminating in a master’s degree from an Ivy League institution, showcases her tenacity and commitment to making a difference in the world. She began her professional career turning around a bodega facing financial insolvency, selling it for 10 times her purchasing price just three years after purchase. She also served as a doula for friends and family, where she saw racism and inequity in the medical system on full display. When her sister and co-founder Ú-Leea was denied a requested medical intervention while giving birth to her daughter and namesake of the company, ALúa, they realized something had to change.

J’Vanay bolsters her perspective with countless community activists, providers, and doulas of color, along with industry leaders with decades of experience, with backgrounds in psychology, health equity, and clinical care. Our CTO Dr. Conward, PhD, has extensive experience creating innovative tech products and building start ups from the ground up. MyLÚA’s founders and broader team are committed to reversing the tides in maternal health in the United States. We ground our content, user experience, and workflows around the opinions of actual parents and clinical experts making us a collective force equipped to address the complex issues within maternal healthcare. We are not merely a team with academic and professional accolades but those who have lived through the challenges and disparities we seek to address as a predominately people of color team. Our proximity to the communities we serve is our greatest asset, as mistrust is one of the greatest barriers to creating quality care as a service. We recognize the best way to break down that barrier is through the deep understanding of our end-users problems and concerns. By continuing to enmesh ourselves in those communities and continue learning, we will show health plans that we are the product to truly move the needle with these groups. 

MyLÚA Health is transforming the maternal health ecosystem through AI-powered care coordination. Medical establishment has ignored cultural competency for too long, and still often rely upon education that is un-engaging & difficult to understand, particularly for less educated patients and minority groups. However, this education is key to enabling a successful pregnancy, birth, and postpartum experience. MyLÚA addresses the critical issues of maternal mortality and disparities in pregnancy outcomes by providing comprehensive and culturally sensitive care, predictive risk assessment, mental health support, and education for pregnant individuals. MyLÚA’s videos are expert-reviewed by clinicians with decades of experience serving diverse populations of parents, but created in short, Instagram-like videos. This ensures parents are actually engaging with the content, while also consuming critical, actionable information to decrease risk & improve their confidence in navigating their maternal care. 

The cornerstone of this idea is our provisionally patented predictive model that can forecast the likelihood of postpartum depression with remarkable (94%) accuracy as early as the 1st trimester. Coupled with our emphasis on mental health and addressing social determinants of health, MyLÚA is reshaping the landscape of maternal care, ensuring every birthing person receives the holistic support they need for a healthy pregnancy and postpartum experience. By doing so, we hope to change the existing space for birthing individuals by making this entire care process more easily accessible, digestible and trustworthy, increasing medical adherence, and service utilization. 

Products such as Ovia, Mae, and Oula understand that patient-centric care is critical to abating the maternal mortality crisis. However, direct-to-consumer products fail to report high levels of engagement or reliability in data collection, therefore, payors and providers are unable to rely on them for cost savings, and improvement of quality outcomes. Their services also tend to cater to higher-information, wealthier parents who are lower-risk groups overall. 

By building a content library catered towards engaging currently disengaged parents, and building specifically for populations that are unlikely to personally be able to pay for a pregnancy support platform, we create impact that our competitors are not building towards.

Our unique value comes with offering a product targeted at lessening an inequity burden for birthing people created by women of color, with women of color in mind. We will use that power to bring value to each customer group by changing the system and how it operates. 

The UN Sustainable Development Goal 3 aligns closely with MyLÚA’s mission, with goals 3.1, 3.2, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.8 as we build a solution that improves pregnancy outcomes, accessible to US populations with the worst outcomes, and building frameworks that, long term, can be applied to developing countries to improve health outcomes and detect risk early.

We know that as much as 70% of health outcomes can be attributed to social and environmental factors, rather than direct care, making the need for affordable healthcare that does not push hundreds of millions further into poverty all the more pressing. MyLÚA Health strives to reduce the financial burden on individuals and families by providing affordable and accessible maternal care solutions that consider these very social determinants of health and their consequences. We aim to ensure that maternal care is readily available to all by partnering and integrating our platform and associated offerings with state health organizations, Medicaid, and private health plans, reducing the need for excessive out-of-pocket expenses. Our solution prioritizes underserved populations, especially managed care organizations serving Medicaid births, and provides these solutions at no direct expense to the patient. This ensures cost is not a barrier to receiving quality maternal care education & risk detection.

In addition, we are committed to addressing the preventable causes of maternal mortality, with a focus and understanding on the effect of mental health and social needs on physical health outcomes. A woman dies every two minutes from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, underscoring the urgent need for improved and holistic maternal care. Our AI-driven platform is designed to provide early detection, personalized care, and support to expectant and postpartum individuals, reducing the risk of maternal mortality. By providing culturally competent mental health education and risk detection, we expand access to these services and reduce preventable complications caused by untreated maternal mental health problems, which can exacerbate risk of pregnancy complications, and even maternal or infant death. In the long term, MyLÚA’s platform will be a strong tool for governments and public health departments to lower risks in their maternal population in a financially sustainable, scalable way, while improving many of the key metrics for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 3. 

MyLÚA’s core technologies are driven by machine learning (ML) models that ingest electronic medical record (EMR), user-generated (mobile health risk assessment (HRA)), and RPM data. To date, MyLÚA has trained/tested a machine learning model to predict postpartum depression (PPD) risk using synthetic EMR data via Synthea. This model was built using HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standards to allow for seamless electronic health record (EHR) system integration across multiple health systems. Moreover, this design framework enables MyLÚA to provide cohort or population-specific algorithms to account for well-known variability across individual health systems via FHIR-based Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) commonly used for data exchange.

Most recently, MyLÚA further developed and validated a similar model with health system partner, Trinity Health, using a 6008 patient deidentified dataset. Compared to the recent work of Zhang et. al where they used electronic medical record data up to childbirth, MyLÚA’s model performance is state-of-the-art. Their results are as follows: AUC: 0.937 | Sensitivity: 0.83 | Specificity: 0.96. Impressively however, given only data in the first trimester of pregnancy, MyLÚA’s results are AUC: 0.943| Sensitivity: 0.92| Specificity: 0.97. As expected, with additional data up to childbirth, MyLÚA’s model performance improves, and results are AUC: 0.945| Sensitivity: 0.94| Specificity: 0.96. Currently, risk models for other costly, maternal comorbidities i.e., preeclampsia and preterm birth are being developed as they are significantly associated with PPD.

 Additionally, MyLÚA gained access to a ~10K pregnant/postpartum patient deidentified dataset from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). This contained rich survey data on social determinants of health (SDOH), health risk assessment (HRA) responses, and limited EMR-related history. MyLÚA used this dataset to train, test, and validate another machine learning algorithm for PPD risk prediction. The model performance results using only data in the first trimester of pregnancy were as follows: Accuracy: 0.94| AUC: 0.893| Sensitivity: 0.96 | Specificity: 0.84. As expected, with additional data up to childbirth, MyLÚA’s model performance improves, and results are Accuracy: 0.94| AUC: 0.93| Sensitivity: 0.96 | Specificity: 0.90. Key social determinants of health and health risk assessment responses were shown to be significant predictors of PPD risk.

 MyLÚA’s data acquisition strategy is multifaceted. As mentioned above, as MyLÚA partners with health providers and health plans, data use agreements are established for the purpose of providing cohort or population-specific algorithms. These datasets will be joined for model improvements. Additionally, MyLÚA’s platform itself is a data collection tool and generates new datasets especially from marginalized population, to enhance data representation. Lastly, MyLÚA continues to build strategic relationships with industry leaders e.g., academic institutions and corporations with large-scale dataset licensing access.

MyLÚA recognizes the ethical nuances of AI in healthcare, especially in predicting postpartum depression. We've ingrained ethical AI practices throughout our platform's lifecycle. Below is a list of potential risks associated with our AI solution, and the proactive measures we've taken to address them:

1. Data Privacy and Security Risks: The sensitive nature of healthcare data can be compromised through unauthorized breaches.

• Our Solution: We employ state-of-the-art encryption methodologies, ensuring all data is protected.

• Our platform's foundation on AWS, combined with our participation in the AWS Health Equity Challenge, provides us with unparalleled security insights.

• Vonage, our chosen SMS service, is recognized for its commitment to encrypted and secure communication, safeguarding any patient data shared via messages.

• Our stringent adherence to HIPAA is further bolstered with a Business Associate Agreement (BAA).

• Regular and rigorous security audits ensure a fortified defense against potential threats.

2. Model Bias and Discrimination: If the training data is not diverse, the AI model could make biased predictions, leading to potential discrimination in healthcare outcomes.

• Our Solution: Our models are trained on nationally representative datasets from a wide range of sites. We also use multiple models to cross-validate predictions, which can highlight and rectify biases. Continuous monitoring ensures that any drift or emerging bias is promptly addressed.

• Fairness Monitoring: We employ fairness indicators to measure and compare model predictions across different demographic groups, ensuring equal treatment.

3. Over-reliance on AI Predictions: The potential overshadowing of human clinical expertise by AI predictions.

• Our Solution: Our technology is framed as a supportive tool, complementing, not replacing, healthcare professionals. We provide extensive training, emphasizing the importance of individual clinical evaluations.

4. Ethical Concerns in Data Utilization: Without informed consent, using patient data for AI modeling can raise ethical concerns.

• Our Solution: We ensure that consent is obtained from patients, and they are informed about how their data will be utilized. They also have the option to opt-out at any stage.

5. Policy and Regulatory Implications: The dynamic landscape of AI and healthcare regulations can pose compliance challenges.

• Our Solution: We maintain an active dialogue with regulatory bodies and have a dedicated team to monitor and adapt to the latest policy changes.

6. Model Transparency and Explainability: Mistrust can emerge from non-transparent AI decision-making.

• Our Solution: Transparency is paramount. We offer in-depth insights into how our models function, nurturing trust among healthcare professionals.

7. Continuous Risk Assessment: Our commitment to safety and efficacy is reflected in our thorough risk assessments. These span data security, ethical considerations, and potential clinical impacts, ensuring our platform's reliability and trustworthiness.

Next year:

Goal 1: Reduce maternal morbidity rate among a cohort of >1000 parents with evidence of impact

Goal 2: Increase self-reported confidence navigating care (1-10 scale) by at least 20% on average among a cohort of >1000 parents with evidence of impact

Goal 3: Get our product in the hands of over 10,000 parents

To achieve this first goal over the next year, we will implement AI-driven monitoring and early intervention protocols for pre and postpartum care, collaborate with state health departments in high-inequity areas like Georgia, Florida, Texas, New Jersey, and California) to integrate our solution into their maternal care infrastructure, and continue to conduct pilot studies in partnership with the National Institutes of Health to validate our approach and tool. 

By providing tailored educational resources and support through our AI-powered platform to boost knowledge, engagement, and autonomy, continuously measuring and assessing confidence levels through user feedback and data analytics, and by iterating and adapting our tools on the backend from user insights to ensure increased usage and satisfaction, we will ensure a minimum 20% increase in self-reported confidence.

Also in the next year, we are forging partnerships with health plans and community organizations to offer our product as a benefit and garner interest, implementing user-friendly interfaces and digital tools in relevant languages for easy accessibility, and employing targeted marketing and outreach campaigns via social media and community partnerships to reach and engage 10,000+ birthing individuals. 

Next 5 years:

Goal 1: Reduce maternal mortality & morbidity rate YoY among >50,000 parents in a beachhead state (NY, NJ, GA, TX, and NC), with a noticeable impact on overall state maternal mortality/morbidity rate by 2027

Goal 2: Achieve racial parity in maternal mortality rates within a cohort of >100,000 parents by 2028 (i.e. eliminate the racial maternal mortality gap within our population)

Goal 3: Cut preeclampsia & preterm birth rate in half compared to baseline Medicaid population for a cohort of >50,000 parents within a particular state by 2028

In order to achieve this, we will be scaling up our care solution across each of these states’ healthcare systems, and health plans by collaborating with state health officers and providers to align strategies, and protocols, working with community organizations and leaders to engage marginalized populations, and creating culturally responsive and equity-focused content, resources, and interventions to lessen the impact of implicit bias and tangible racial disparity. In order to cut preeclampsia and preterm birth rates in half, we will be working alongside state Medicaid programs to integrate our solution and measure outcomes, making changes that are needed along the way, and updating our predictive model capability to use social determinants of health data for early detection of these conditions.

4 full-time staff, 6 part-time staff/contractors, and 1 external contractor software team that include 8 contractors.

J’Vanay Santos-Fabian the CEO of MyLÚA Health has been in the ideation phase since 2020 after being a doula and witnessing inequities and lack of trust in the delivery of maternal care. However, she and the other two co-founders have been formally working together on this solution since July 2022. 

Maternal health disparities in the United States persist, disproportionately affecting communities of color, notably Black Americans who face significantly higher risks of maternal mortality compared to their White counterparts.

MyLÚA Health’s focus on maternal healthcare and equity stem from Ú-Leea’s birthing experience; she was denied medical intervention even after she herself, her sister who is a doula, and her mother who is a nurse with 20 years of experience attempted to advocate for her needs and wishes. From these experiences, our original co-founders J'Vanay and Ú-Leea, realized that in order to properly address maternal health issues in these communities, the leadership team and employees have to not only sympathize, but be able to empathize. Our advisors and expert clinicians come from diverse backgrounds that enable culturally informed perspectives across many groups. We remain as committed as ever to increasing the representation of underrepresented groups on our team.

We prioritize parents’ voices and lived experience in creating our product. J’Vanay and Ú-Leea began their journey by speaking with over 100 birthing individuals. It became evident that this incident was common and leading to indisputable outcome disparities. Providers lack the time and capacity to hear concerns and make informed decisions with their patients. This leaves birthing individuals feeling rushed, unheard, dismissed and ultimately at risk for avoidable adverse outcomes. As we continue pilot studies and customer interviews, we are making a conscious effort to find participants who are most often left out of research data collection. Specifically, we are working on making sure translators and interpreters are available in order to expand our customer interview base pool. 

The MyLÚA Health co-founders and broader team are motivated by a vision of creating a solution and community that finally has a tangible impact on making pregnancy and childbirth safe, regardless of race, ethnicity, sex, education, socioeconomic status, etc. In order to achieve this, we are taking actionable steps to intentionally make our solution equitable and inclusive. Even in situations where patients receive time and information from their providers, other barriers for comfortability include language access. Our materials are being translated into Spanish first, while exploring market solutions to translate our content across many languages while maintaining high medical standards & user experience. By increasing language accessibility, we will increase engagement & user confidence with their own healthcare journey, as well as engagement with the healthcare system overall.

In the long term, we ensure any resources or referrals we give to parents on our platform conform to our own equity & cultural competence standards, including collecting feedback from users and creating scorecards for resources and providers to ensure they meet our standards. Other goals include developing unconscious bias training for partner organizations and our care navigators alike, and partnering with organizations/individuals that support underrepresented and underserved populations in health care like the National Birth Equity Collaborative, Black Mamas Matter Alliance, and micro and macro diverse social media influencers to bolster our content library and create greater trust and engagement for parents using our platform.

MyLÚA Health’s operational model and plan represent a comprehensive and innovative approach to addressing the maternal care crisis in the United States, with a particular focus on Black and Brown communities. 

At MyLÚA Health, cultural humility is at the core of our mission. We recognize that understanding the unique cultural backgrounds, beliefs, and traditions of the communities we serve, the underserved, is paramount. Our team intentionally reflects the diversity we aim to support. This diversity ensures that cultural sensitivity, awareness, and relevance are embedded in every facet of our approach, from content creation to outreach efforts. By engaging with and listening to community members, we build trust and establish a strong rapport with health plans, and end users alike. This cultural congruence is what will drive comfort followed by genuine engagement with self-reported surveys, medical information, and product usage, resulting in better outcomes and earlier detection of co-morbidities. 

We also acknowledge the longstanding mistrust that many minority communities hold towards the healthcare system. To bridge this gap, we have adopted a multi-faceted approach. First, we actively engage with community leaders, healthcare advocates, and local-level influencers to foster a sense of trust and credibility in our content and product. We are also planning to conduct outreach programs and community events through partners, where our product and consumers can interact directly. This will help us evaluate and address constantly evolving concerns. This approach helps rebuild trust and encourages individuals to seek services while increasing medical adherence. 

Additionally, to ensure our content is accessible to the widest audience, we provide information in easily digestible, bite-sized formats. Health information can be overwhelming, especially for those with lower literacy levels, so we invest in content that simplifies complex medical concepts such as prenatal and postpartum information, birthing complications, etc. By offering this, we break down barriers to understanding and empower individuals to make truly informed rather than forced decisions about their health. 

In order to provide care that is trustworthy, free of barriers, and addresses preventable complications before they become critical, partnerships are part of our operations. MyLÚA actively seeks out partnerships with local organizations and resources (food banks, mental health services, housing, etc) and audits their resources to ensure alignment. We create equity scorecards for each partner to make sure they effectively meet the needs of our consumers and their communities. These scorecards hold partners accountable and can measure the experiences had by the users through our referrals and personalized recommendations. We also collaborate with health plans in order to market our solution to pregnant individuals by onboarding them onto our platform through health plans. By extension, in-network providers also partner with us to expand our reach through referrals. We offer them benefits by providing education and support to their members, integrating our data with their existing systems, increasing patient engagement, and decreasing cost from avoidable complications. By joining forces with health plans, and patients and providers in turn, we ensure wide access to services and seamless maternal care within the broader healthcare ecosystem.

By selling to health plans, and managed care organizations in particular, we can scale our offerings across tens of thousands of parents while maintaining moderate variable costs. Based on our financial projections, we can attain financial sustainability with as few as 5 large customers, or about 10 thousand parents served. We will charge an implementation fee as well as a monthly fee based on the total number of parents served by our product, and finally, a per member per month fee, contingent on agreed-upon outcomes data with an incentives structure to provide MyLÚA Health a cut of cost savings for the health plan.

In the short term, we are raising seed round funding to bring our total capital raise to about $2 million, including NIH’s RADx grant and other non-dilutive grants. This will provide us the funds to complete the product, content creation, user testing and piloting. We will also begin to further risk models for other common pregnancy complications, simultaneously hiring personnel dedicated to sales and marketing. This should provide us with a runway until mid-2025, at which point we will have on-boarded enough paying health plans to sustain ourselves financially. 

While expanding to health plans serving similar populations will provide the greatest economies of scale, our initial contract price is well above our break-even point even for entirely new locales that require re-auditing of education and resources and an expansion of our peer support staff. As we achieve more outcomes data, the cost savings offered by our education and risk assessment schedule will become more robust, allowing us to expand even to all health plan organizations, not just those buying into our mission. 

Current and Projected Operating Costs

1. Current Operating Costs: Our present operating costs stand at a monthly burn rate of $30,000. This amount encompasses various expenses, including rent, utilities, software subscriptions, marketing, and most crucially, human capital, which involves salaries, benefits, and training costs for our team members.

Breaking down the $30,000:
7% - Admin Expense and Training
16% - COGS/Tech Ops
15% - Marketing: $4,500
62% -  Human Capital (Salaries, Benefits, and Training)

Please note, these are approximate figures, and the actual allocation may vary depending on specific needs and unforeseen expenditures.
 
Annual Cost: At this burn rate, our annual operating cost amounts to $360,000 ($30,000 x 12).

2. Projected Operating Costs for Next Year: Anticipating growth, strategic investments, and expansion in our team and services, we foresee our monthly burn rate increasing to $50,000 in the coming year. This increase will be directed towards expanding our market reach, investing in research and development, improving our infrastructure, and hiring new talent to augment our capabilities.
 
Annual Cost: With this increased burn rate, our projected annual operating cost for the next year would be $600,000 ($50,000 x 12).
 
Human Capital Estimates: At the core of our organization is our dedicated team, the main component of our burn rate. We intend on growing our team of experts as we enter into new markets and seek to capture our beachhead states. 

Projected Scenario: With our anticipated burn rate for human capital increasing to $29,000, we're planning on several initiatives:
Hiring: We plan to onboard additional talent. We anticipate adding 3-4 new employees, spread across various functions including sales, product, and operations.
Training: An increased budget allocation towards enhancing our team's skills, ensuring they are equipped with the latest industry knowledge.
 
In summary, our current operating costs are $360,000 annually, with human capital forming a significant portion of this expenditure. As we look forward to the next year, we're projecting an operating cost of $600,000, with a strong emphasis on scaling our team and investing in their growth and well-being.

We are requesting $100,000 to continue our work in 2024. As we’re moving towards launch with our first paying customer, we plan to expand our risk detection models to include pre-eclampsia, preterm birth, and gestational diabetes for the future. To do so, we’ll need to license additional data from health partners, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars, in addition to internal labor costs to ensure our product and business is sustainable while our CTO takes the time required to research and build out further models. Once additional models are built we’ll need to find partners to validate and test our model, which tend to be unpaid pilots. Finally, we’ll need funds as we continue to fine tune and update our postpartum depression model and validate it among different populations. 

There are many other business expenses and costs as we look to scale and grow, but these are our main priorities with regard to expanding our AI/ML capabilities. We may also explore incorporating our generative AI vendor more closely into our product, which could lower our labor costs. However, due to the sensitive nature of our solution, we are ensuring clinician buy-in and auditing at every stage, to avoid irresponsible use of technology and maximize the value parents get from the experience.

The Cure Residency will provide MyLÚA Health with the essential resources and support we need to accelerate our growth and overall development. The seed funding would help us expand our risk detection model to include more conditions, such as pre-eclampsia, preterm birth, and gestational diabetes, license additional data from partners and health plans to improve the accuracy of our model, grow our team in order to scale our solution and reach more end users, and invest in outreach efforts to increase awareness of MyLÚA Health as a potential health plan benefit. 

In addition, the mentorship along with the lab space will provide us with access to expertise and physical infrastructure that is needed to build our product past a minimum viable product and scale it. Other than learning from and alongside experienced mentors, we would gain access to a physical space for collaboration with our own team members that can help accelerate and further our development as a company. 

We are most excited about the educational programming, and mentorship aspects of the Cure Residency because of the knowledge we stand to gain through the new network, other founders, and educational material. As mentorship can also bring us in touch with investors that align with our mission and product, consumers, and partners, we know that the opportunities Cure Residency can bring us can help us help birthing individuals and their families. These aspects will be invaluable for us as we keep learning, and troubleshooting in order to bring our product to the market.