Maven: A ten-year roadmap in women’s and family health

By Kate Ryder, founder and CEO, Maven Clinic

Despite more than a decade of digital health innovation, America’s health outcomes continue to rank last among high-income peers, even as we spend twice as much as everyone else. One could draw the conclusion that hundreds of billions poured into thousands of digital health companies isn’t really working.

The truth of the matter – in a massive, complex, and highly entrenched healthcare system – is that we’re still at the very beginning. It’s only now – 10+ years into our journey – that Maven and the other very best and most successful platforms have the breadth, the distribution channels, and the multi-dimensional datasets required to create scaled change. 

Today, Maven is announcing a $125m fundraise at a $1.7 billion valuation, making us the most valued digital health company in women’s and family health. This is a meaningful milestone – a testament to our team and to our resolve in prioritizing product excellence over quick profits. But we work in more than a $4 trillion industry. And so, for all our efforts and all our successes, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what we intend to do.

Real change, of course, takes time. The first Apple computer came to market in 1976, and it wasn’t until 2000 that 50% of U.S. households had a computer. At Maven, we’ve now established the opportunity and the magnitude of the change underway. Women’s and family health has been chronically plagued by legacy commercial models that perpetuate gaps in care and fail to solve for patient experience. This is a sad reality, but it also makes our category ripe for innovation that squarely meets patient need and fosters better incentive structures. 

Over the past decade, Maven established the right to play, at scale, in this system. The next decade is about transformation. Maven is reshaping this most fundamental, deeply-personal, and deeply-human aspect of healthcare – creating the system every patient and every family deserves. But first, as essential context, we should consider how we’ve gotten here and where the market stands now. 

The last ten years

I launched Maven ten years ago due to a fundamental belief that women’s and family health needed to be taken more seriously, and needed to hold a more central place in every healthcare system across the world. I was in London, with plans to move back to the U.S. to start my own family. My friends were starting to have kids and I was shocked to see so many of them suffer from basic gaps in access to care. One had postpartum depression and lived in her sadness for over a year without support. Another had infertility issues and couldn’t afford IVF. 

The story that has played out, nationally and globally, since Maven’s founding, is one of simultaneous progress and setbacks. My friend who suffered postpartum depression would likely have been screened leaving the hospital if she were having kids today, and would have been able to get support from a maternal mental health provider. My other friend would have had her IVF paid for by her employer and may have had a larger family as a result. If these friends worked at one of the 2,000+ employers and health plans who offer Maven, we would have handled all of it: the IVF benefit coverage, postpartum depression screenings, and virtual access to maternal mental healthcare. There have also been notable advancements in diagnostics, at-home fertility testing kits and cancer screenings, and postpartum depression drug development; same-sex couples are finally included in eligibility for basic IVF and surrogacy coverage, and new virtual-first models to support women in menopause are emerging, Maven’s included.  

On the other hand, healthcare for many women is worse today than it was ten years ago. With Roe v Wade overturned and access to fundamental aspects of women’s healthcare now denied in many states, the stories of women who have needlessly died due to lack of basic healthcare are now disturbingly common as front-page news. Black women are still 3x more likely than white women to die in childbirth, with more than half of maternal deaths recorded the day after birth. Thirty-five percent of U.S. counties are maternity care deserts, meaning that they don’t have OB-GYNs or midwives. The number of deserts has increased since Maven was founded, and is expected to increase further – due to rural hospital closures and OB-GYNs leaving the 21 states with restricted access to women’s healthcare. 

As our team has navigated these realities, we’ve held firm to our staunch insistence at meeting the patient where they are. This required creating the first-ever holistic virtual care model for fertility, maternity, and family building in digital health. We brought together a diverse range of practitioners into thoughtful, patient-centric support models. In doing this, we linked return to work support and virtual pediatrics to postpartum care for new moms. We introduced conception coaching (helping women get pregnant naturally) to the family building journey, and we helped ensure those sorely in need of fertility treatments have ready access to high quality care. All of this stemmed from a clear-eyed perspective on what the patient needed. We turned long-standing questions on their head. The question was not how to reimburse two IVF cycles. The question was how to get a baby in the hands of a hopeful family as quickly, safely, and affordably as possible.

Over the last ten years, we’ve proven that virtual care models can drive better maternal health outcomes for moms and babies, reducing unnecessary C-sections and NICU spend. We’ve published 15 peer reviewed studies and proven with clients through claims-based studies that we can both deliver better outcomes and better member experience while simultaneously reducing costs in maternity spend – typically a top cost bucket for payers. We’ve proven that virtual care models improve health equity in a system that desperately needs it (though much more needs to be done via policy). We’ve also proven that the inefficiencies of healthcare don’t need to be repeated in the fertility space, and that value-based fertility benefits –  where payment models are aligned to what’s best for the patient – are both possible and necessary. 

This leaves us where we are today: with some clear signs of progress paired with stubborn gaps in care – and much work to be done to translate the care model innovations of the last ten years into system-wide cost and outcomes impact.

Maven’s ten-year roadmap

The starting point of our roadmap is a hard look at what currently blocks innovation from translating into scaled change.

We work in a category defined by gaps in care. Miscarriage, postpartum care, menopause, maternal mental health – everyday parts of a women’s reproductive journey – are not well-accounted for in the traditional system. And these are not just episodic moments to deliver care. These are some of the most personal and vulnerable moments of life – moments that color your very being, and can also color your trust in healthcare for life. 

The way to improve this dynamic is simple in concept: payment model change. 

But the pathway to achieve payment model change is far from simple. Changing reimbursement models requires ROI. ROI, at scale, requires improvements in patient engagement. Better patient engagement, at scale, requires dramatically better access to, and usage of, data. And better data, at scale, requires something traditional healthcare models seem to be getting worse at every year: fostering trust.

Maven has a unique opportunity. We are a mission-driven organization, leading with product, with access to the broad and unique datasets required to give a representative picture of patients and their needs. And, most basically and most fundamentally, our head is where our heart is. 

With all of this as a backdrop, we will focus on three levers as we walk the path outlined above:  

1. We are evolving payment methodologies & fertility benefits administration in a way that aligns much better with what patients want and need – and we’re doing it in deep partnership with the payers and provider groups 
2. We are nailing, once and for all, value-based care models for maternity care – again in lockstep with the nation’s largest payers and provider groups who want to change the status quo
3. We are dramatically moving the needle on patient experience and engagement globally, empowered by AI and technology, to meet a wide range of patients (across countries, geographies, and socioeconomic bands) with the support they need, in the way they need it  

I outline each of these three levers in more detail, below. 

Rewriting best practice fertility benefits

At Maven, we call our fertility benefits administration product Maven Managed Benefit, or MMB. 

When we started building MMB in 2022, we saw heightened anxiety from our members about how to start a family, and we heard from fertility doctors about incentive misalignments – with higher-priced procedures often recommended even when they weren’t right for the patient. We also heard from our corporate and health plan partners that costs were ballooning. IVF medication, for example, is 84% more expensive today than in 2014, often costing upwards of $7,000 per cycle. 

We made it our mission to support the shortest and most affordable pathway to parenthood for every member. We leveraged our virtual care to build a Trying-To-Conceive Coaching program, supporting natural conception where possible. For those who need IVF, we have designed a flexible benefit that gives intended parents every possible shot at a healthy outcome – all with a core focus on keeping fertility care affordable. 

In our first 18 months operating MMB, we have brought millions of lives under management. In the years to come we will deepen our partnerships with clinics to make a seamless experience between our virtual care model, our payment platform, and best-in-class in-person care. Fertility care remains so much about the quality of the doctor, and patient-specific choices, that we’re excited to help shepherd a data-driven and more personalized approach. We see this as the key to reducing patient anxiety while enabling the largest possible percentage of families to get pregnant quickly, healthily, and affordably.  

Landing value-based maternity care

Our maternity program, the bedrock of our platform, is increasingly reaching diverse populations across the world, some of whom are quite vulnerable to poor outcomes. Whereas MMB and fertility are all about managing the total cost of care to get the best outcomes, our virtual maternity program is all about driving best-in-class engagement and trust, which in turn empowers women to have healthier pregnancies, deliver at term, and recover safely and comfortably.

We launched our maternity product in 2015: A free virtual clinic that women can access on their phone, with diverse providers complementing in-person care. Not just 30+ types of providers, but providers who look like their patients, speak their language, and share their lived experience – a culturally competent model of virtual care. As with fertility, outcomes in this space hinge significantly on doctor and hospital quality. We measure risk in our patients; pair them with care teams that might include OB-GYNs, mental health providers, pelvic floor therapists, doulas and sleep coaches; and help them follow action plans based on their risk profile to ensure a healthier pregnancy. Throughout this process, we’re always on 24/7 to urgently respond to needs, and always available to advise on navigating both referrals and financial dimensions of care. 

This model represents an advancement in best-practice care – but is only phase one. The opportunity of virtual care lies not just in improving access and coaching, but also in utilizing real-time data to connect Maven’s platform with a broader ecosystem of benefits and care services. The right data drives the right engagement models, which in turn can better predict risk, and partner with in-person care to drive better maternal health outcomes. It can also make the day-to-day tedium of healthcare more convenient, transparent, and trustworthy. Doing this work well enables Maven to take full-risk and truly align payment models with the best outcomes, and frees a mother to do the most important thing: take care of herself. 

Harnessing technology to add to strength in patient engagement

When we invest in technology at Maven, we do so with obsessive focus on a single goal: patient experience. 

Over the past decade, we’ve built a broad, human-centered care engine, enabling synchronous and asynchronous engagement meeting a range of medical and non-medical needs that genuinely meets the patient where they are. This includes not just fertility, maternity, and family building, but also core and often-overlooked areas like return-to-work, parenting and pediatrics, and menopause.

We’ve been in this space long enough to remember when people worried robots would one day replace doctors. As AI overtakes the headlines, we know advanced technologies are meant to play a different role than human caregivers, and will not replace them in many circumstances. They will, however, dramatically improve those interactions, by sharpening our ability to synthesize the “so what” of a wide range of conversations and data points (clinical and non-clinical), leading to needle-in-a-haystack type insights that fundamentally change care quality. 

All of this will build on Maven’s current power – personalization and engagement – to create a kind of hyper-personalization we take for granted in consumer technology, but consider unthinkable in healthcare. A decade ago, we started with telehealth and care advocacy, and in the years since have layered in data and custom workflows to maximize the effectiveness of care coaches. But the constellation of data-points around a member is far too complex and noisy for even the best care coaches to synthesize. 

Without saying too much, I can share with excitement that Maven’s core technological focus for the coming years will be landing an AI-empowerment model enabling our care engine to transform best-in-class member engagement across all of our life phases into care insights and highly personalized action plans at radically improved rates of clinical efficacy and operational efficiency. 

At the most basic level, I think of this as Maven being a good listener. Our current care engine allows us to translate what we hear into insights and action. New technology will make us a great listener.

This is fundamentally why we are here today. Ten years ago, women’s and family health was systematically underestimated and underfunded. The next decade will have its own regressions, no doubt. But when we hold tight to our vision – accessible, compassionate, and trustworthy care that improves lives – we prove that women’s and family health is not merely an emission of broader digital health innovation: it is the engine. We prove that when we learn to engage our most vulnerable patients, in their most vulnerable health journeys, they bring their entire communities with them. We prove that when Maven builds better healthcare for women and families, we are also building better healthcare for everyone.