Tag Archives: health equity

How These Two Founders Are Upgrading Maternal Health Through Cultural Competence and Remote Monitoring

April 27, 2023Business, Health, Innovation, Startups, UncategorizedAnish Sebastian, babyscripts, Childrens Health, cultural competence, Health, health equity, Health Moonshots, Health Transformers, Healthcare, Jade Kearney, Logan Plaster, maternal health, remote patient monitoring, She Matters, womens healthNicole Kinsey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:52 — 21.9MB)

Today in the United States, we do an entirely poor job of taking care of our pregnant mothers. If you look at statistics like maternal morbidity and mortality, it’s been going up. And, through the pandemic, it’s only gone downhill. We’re one of the worst – actually the worst – of any advanced country.

Welcome back to StartUp Health NOW, the podcast where we celebrate the entrepreneurs and innovators who are transforming health.

Today we’ve got two very special guests on the show talking about one extremely important topic: maternal health. This is a topic that has been front and center in health news lately and not for good reasons. In spite of all our progress in healthtech, the US has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world.

The World Health Organization reports that a maternal death occurred almost every two minutes in 2020.

What’s worse, maternal health brings to light racial health inequities in a stark and disturbing way. According to the CDC, Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women.

But we’re not here just to talk about the problem. Our guests are two Health Transformers who have dedicated their lives to changing the maternal health story.

First, you’ll get to hear from Jade Kearney, CEO & Founder of She Matters, a new platform that trains doctors in culturally-competent care so that – among other things – Black women are heard and understood during childbirth. They also created a virtual community for moms to get support and improve the health outcomes for Black mothers.

Next, we’ll have a conversation with Anish Sebastian, CEO & Co-founder of Babyscripts. Babyscripts is a long-time member of our community that is bringing virtual care and remote monitoring into the pregnancy and postpartum journey so that more women get the care they need when and where they need it most.

Listen in for their stories and solutions for upgrading maternal health.

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Looking to break down health barriers? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.
Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.

Prioritizing Health Equity Through Sustained Action and Equitable Innovation

March 3, 2023Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsAletha Maybank MD, AMA, American Medical Association, Dr Aletha Maybank, health equity, Health Equity Moonshot, Innovation, KP Yelpaala, Logan PlasterNicole Kinsey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:52 — 47.2MB)

Last year StartUp Health launched a Health Equity Moonshot with the goal of creating a guiding equity framework for how we support health startups. That work has been led by our Chief Impact Officer Kaakpema “KP” Yelpaala. One of the first things KP did was to build a cross-disciplinary impact board who could help us guide our policies, and one of the first people he turned to for that task was today’s guest, Aletha Maybank, MD, MPH.

Dr. Maybank is the Chief Health Equity Officer & Senior VP at the American Medical Association. In the world of health equity, that’s a big deal because she guides critical policy decisions for an organization that numbers more than a quarter of a million healthcare professionals.

We wanted to have Dr. Maybank in for a Fireside Chat to get a candid look at the work she’s been doing at the AMA and hear her vision for the future. In the conversation, which was hosted by KP Yelpaala and held in front of a virtual audience of Health Transformers from our portfolio, Dr. Maybank draws a line between intention and outcomes and explains why more institutions need to do the hard internal work of examining inequitable structures.

Looking to break down health barriers? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com

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Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates at startuphealth.com/content.
Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox.

Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.

Sue Siegel, Former CEO of GE Ventures and Chief Innovation Officer at GE, Joins StartUp Health’s Impact Board to Advance Health Moonshots

November 1, 2022Business, Health, Innovation, Startups, UncategorizedGE, GE Ventures, health equity, Health Moonshots, Healthymagination, Logan Plaster, StartUp Health, Sue SiegelNicole Kinsey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:26 — 22.3MB)

In this week’s StartUp Health NOW episode, we continue a series we’ve been running where we sit down with members of StartUp Health’s Impact Board to learn a bit about their stories and why they’re so passionate about this health moonshot model of supporting founders at scale.

Today we’re talking to the venerable Sue Siegel, former Chief Innovation Officer at GE and CEO at GE Ventures and at Healthymagination, an initiative GE launched in order to invest billions of dollars into helping deliver better healthcare to more people at a lower cost.

Now, Siegel is leveraging all of that experience to help StartUp Health scale our mission of inspiring, educating, and investing in a global army of Health Transformers. In our interview, we get to hear Siegel’s wisdom about what it’s really going to take to move the needle on health. She also shares why she’s so passionate about professional mentorship and gives a few rules for the road for would-be mentors.

As you’ll hear in the interview, in addition to be a wealth of knowledge, Siegel brings an enormous level of empathy and humility to her work. We were inspired talking to her and are excited to share the conversation here.

Join us at the StartUp Health Festival @ HLTH, Nov 13-16, 2022, in Las Vegas, to learn more and get involved with our health moonshots.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com

Investors: How to invest in StartUp Health Moonshots healthmoonshots.com
Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates at startuphealth.com/content.
Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox.

Passionate about Type 1 diabetes? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our T1D Moonshot.

Looking to break down health barriers? If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, contact us to learn how you can join our Health Equity Moonshot.

KP Yelpaala Shares the Mission & Vision Behind StartUp Health’s Health Equity Moonshot

September 20, 2022Business, Health, Innovation, StartupsHealth Disparities, health equity, Health Equity Moonshot, health inequity, Health Moonshot, InOn Health, Kaakpema Yelpaala, KP Yelpaala, Logan Plaster, SoDH, StartUp HealthNicole Kinsey

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:32 — 35.1MB)

As our listeners will know, StartUp Health invests in what we call health moonshots. These are big, audacious health goals that guide us as we push innovative health entrepreneurs — our global army of Health Transformers — to collaborate and focus on long-term impact. We have health moonshots around curing cancer, improving women’s health, ending the opioid crisis, and we’ve recently added another focused on Type 1 diabetes.

This week, we launched a Health Equity Moonshot at the Clinton Global Initiative in order to build a framework that re-orients these inspiring problem solvers to tackle the challenge beneath the challenge, the social and systemic factors that drive health inequities. This transformative initiative will be integrated into all of StartUp Health’s other health moonshots, breaking down silos and encouraging local and global collaboration.

Leading StartUp Health’s Health Equity Moonshot is Kaakpema “KP” Yelpaala, a global health entrepreneur and long-time Health Transformer (he is the CEO & Co-founder of StartUp Health portfolio company InOn Health) who has dedicated his life to reducing health disparities. Yelpaala is an American of Ghanaian heritage and sits at the intersection of the immigrant and Black experiences in the United States.

In this StartUp Health NOW podcast episode, Yelpaala will share his vision for a Health Equity Moonshot and why it is necessary today.

Want to join this Health Equity Moonshot? If you’re an investor who believes in this vision, we want to hear from you. Are you a founder focused on breaking down health barriers for historically marginalized communities or who has been held back based on systemic bias in race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation? We want to hear from you.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health startuphealth.com

Dr. Sandro Galea: Changing the Conversation Around Health

June 30, 2020Business, Health, Innovation, Startups, UncategorizedBoston University, Cure Disease, Digital Health, future of health, health equity, health innovation, Healthcare, Nicole Clark, sandro galeaStartUp Health NOW

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:04 — 29.4MB)

To improve health, not just healthcare, we have to do the hard work of building a healthier world. And that, says Sandro Galea, MD, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, starts with investing in preventative care infrastructures, not just in treatments. In this episode of StartUp Health NOW, Galea shares the inspiration for his book Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health and urges us to think more deeply about the interconnected forces around us—from money and power to love and hate, compassion, fairness, and justice—and how they can lead to sustainable health.

Entrepreneurs: How to get investment from StartUp Health https://www.startuphealth.com/
Investors: How to invest in StartUp Health Moonshots http://www.healthmoonshots.com

Want more content like this? You can subscribe to the podcast as well as other health innovation updates at startuphealth.com/content. Sign up for StartUp Health Insider™ to get funding insights, news, and special updates delivered to your inbox.