Giving New Mothers New Life: How a Healthcare Accelerator Helped a Startup Highlight Postpartum Health

Having a baby is a momentous event. It's at once the end of a nearly 10-month-long growth period and the beginning of a new series of milestones.

Research reveals that more than one in three mothers experience lasting health problems after birth, and even well-meaning healthcare providers miss opportunities to address them. I experienced this firsthand with my first child, and I knew I couldn't be the only one.

My experience put me face to face with our fractured healthcare system. The gap in reliable self-care for moms led me to create Joyuus, a program designed to deliver trusted, engaging content and resources to improve well-being during the critical 12-month postpartum period. We are on a mission to transform the postpartum experience by providing a real-time, evidence-based, actionable health platform centered on the insights of moms and those who care for them.

Strong priorities set the right course

As a woman-led company in a burgeoning field, it can feel especially difficult to get traction to differentiate a product. With this in mind, my top priorities were:

• Listening to our end users and customers before and while building
• Gaining access to key industry experts and decision-makers
• Securing essential visibility in a crowded market
• Finding a partner with relevant expertise and a shared mission

We began building our product based on feedback from postpartum moms and providers to address 12 months of postpartum care. Alongside the engineering team, we also sought a technology partner that understood our needs for growth and scale. Driving our mission to change women’s health forward required a partner who understood our challenges, recognized the value of visibility, and was willing to engage in ongoing collaboration to turn a bold vision into a viable solution.

We turned to Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the HPE Digital Health Foundry Program to help us cut through the noise.

With the right connections, we kept climbing

The Digital Health Foundry Program is an innovation accelerator that provides startups like Joyuus with infrastructure and resources, regulatory and technological advising services, and access to industry experts.

Joyuus became the first-ever startup to partner with the program. Apart from getting access to HPE technology, we've had the rare opportunity to share our story and mission with a broader audience. The Foundry has increased our visibility, placing us on stages and providing us with networking opportunities. We've even had opportunities to speak with incredible women like HPE Global Vice President of Human Resources Aisha Washington and HPE CTO Fidelma Russo.

“Because of the HPE Digital Health Foundry Program, we've had the rare opportunity to share our story and mission with a broader audience. The Foundry has increased our visibility, placing us on stages and providing us with networking opportunities.”

Because of the Foundry's access to industry-leading experts, our team has had the chance to pressure-test ideas, request letters of support for grants, and connect with people who have direct links to potential customers.

Developing and defining tech integrations

Once we reached a point where we had compiled the science, we needed to hear from our customers to understand how the technology intersected with their experience. Getting customer feedback early and throughout development was going to be critical to understand how to address the pain points of our end users and our end customers.

Joyuus worked alongside the Advisory and Professional Services from HPE to help define what our technology integrations should look like. This process gave us a deep understanding of key technology underpinnings and requirements before we set out to build core pieces for large employers and healthcare systems.

This process also helped us understand customer pain points. Since we were able to have conversations in a safe and supported environment, we could learn everything we needed to learn before going out to pilot or pitch.

Access to candid customer feedback will only become more important as Joyuus grows and our technology evolves. We are also exploring tools such as HPE AI Services to understand how it can support predictive modeling and analytics as we broaden our women's health data platform. It's exciting to know that we have so much potential, and we have an excellent partner in HPE that wants us to succeed.

Built-in risk detection for moms who need it most

Joyuus is at the beginning of a pivotal health journey for women. But if we're going to change the game, we have to start with a use case that proves our purpose on a small scale.

HPE has walked that path with us, and they’ve always been hands on during our development. One such example is their work with our engineering and data science team during a predictive model workshop. We asked: What if we didn't just ask moms what their risks are, but predicted them early, even if they didn't know they were at risk?

During the day-long workshop, we hashed out risk factors, potential triggers, and more. We came out of that session with actionable recommendations based on HPE's knowledge and expertise. Then, we developed some early modeling based on the data we'd already collected.

Today, Joyuus uses a predictive model that can strongly predict the risk of postpartum depression. With this, our platform has moved beyond discussing risk to proactively identifying it. Our aim, starting with depression, is to get more actionable data to healthcare providers so new moms can receive much-needed care faster.

In an evaluation of Joyuus among pregnant and postpartum women, participants showed trends for improvement, specifically related to depression and anxiety. While these results are based on a small sample size and the pilot wasn’t designed to provide definitive evidence of meaningful treatment effects, it suggests that Joyuus could improve postpartum health outcomes, and potentially for anxiety and depression when comprehensive unbiased care is otherwise inaccessible.

Innovation for those carrying the next generation

HPE's authenticity, integrity, and honesty have provided a solid partnership to inform our platform development. It's hard to gain momentum in the women's health space when we're rarely invited into the neighborhood, let alone given a clear path to knocking on a door. HPE has been a constant, authentic partner with a shared vision. They have prioritized opening some of those doors so we can walk through, and they have put us in rooms where we're seen and heard. Not only do we have a stronger sense of security and trust, but we have the voice, connections, and visibility to bring our mission to the world stage.

‍“HPE has been a constant, authentic partner with a shared vision.”

We are solving problems earlier and helping new moms stay healthy and connected instead of overwhelmed and isolated. As we continue to empower, encourage, and support moms through this critical time, we are well positioned to prove Joyuus' mission, scale our platform, and drive meaningful change in women’s health.