Melissa Hanna, co-founder and CEO of maternity health tech startup Mahmee, is using technology to address one of the countries biggest issues: the maternal mortality rate. Mahmee is a revolutionary data-driven maternal and infant health tech company upending the field by prioritizing the voices of patients and giving them a platform for all of their needs and concerns.

The United States continues to be one of the most dangerous countries for Black women to give birth in, with the worst maternal death rate of any developed country on Earth. Vice President Kamala Harris recently penned an op/ed for Blavity about the urgency of the crisis. More than 700 mothers die from complications during births and 50,000 become severely injured each year.

“The stats show just how much worse it is to be a Black woman in this country giving birth. It cannot be denied anymore,” Hanna told Blavity.

“Why has it gotten this bad? Because the industry is really fragmented, and so there's sadly a lot of pointing fingers. There's a lot of excuses, a lot of blame to go around.”

The Center For Disease Control released a report that found Black Mothers are three to four times more likely to die during childbirth. They added that three out of every five deaths that occurred during childbirth were preventable.

“It's not OK that the United States has so many Black women and Black babies dying and becoming injured every year from things that were otherwise preventable,” Hanna said.

“When you look into the statistics, you see we are doing a disservice to all women in ways that are undeniable but beyond that, the way that Black women and Black babies are cared for in this country needs to change.”

Hanna saw the disgraceful state of the maternal healthcare field and decided to take matters into her own hands when she founded Mahmee in 2014 to directly address the issue.

“One of the things our company is working on is better infrastructure to connect the dots, so that we can all work on solving this problem together. It's not gonna be solved by any one organization, or doctor, or hospital, or insurance company. Everyone is affected by these statistics,” she said.

Mahmee is attracting attention for its groundbreaking work in helping women manage their health throughout and even after pregnancy by using technology that has been available for years.

Through the platform, which has three moderately priced tiers, expecting mothers can link the health records of their child with their own and get expert advice from physicians if there are any problems.

The Mahmee memberships give you access to coaching from licensed nurses as well as mental health services, nutrition advice, classes, support groups and telehealth services. “In the maternity healthcare process, on the surface, there are generally three or four people involved: the mother, the baby, and each of their physicians. What we don’t see are the many other people helping them: nurses, lactation consultants, midwives, nutritionists, therapists, doulas, home health aids, social workers and more,” Hanna said.

“This industry is lacking the IT infrastructure needed to connect these professionals from different organizations to each other, and to follow and monitor patients across practices and health systems. This missing element creates gaps in care. Mahmee is the glue that connects the care ecosystem and closes the gaps.”

Through the site, mothers can ask questions of experts, get advice, join support groups and take online classes on a variety of topics related to their pregnancy.

According to Hanna, the goal is to catch problems before they occur instead of reacting in the moment to issues.

“Our goal is to reduce the number of mothers and babies that are dying and getting injured in this country from issues that were otherwise preventable. You can't necessarily prevent everything from happening, but most of the challenges that we’re facing as a country right now when it comes to the lives of mothers and babies are preventable,” she said.

“It’s really sad that we aren't doing more to stop it, especially for Black mothers who have the highest risk.”

Though joining Mahmee is free, access to doctors and other advisors requires a subscription, which ranges in price depending on the package selected.

Hanna said the price is designed to be paid by one’s health insurance provider, but mothers can pay for it directly if they would like. There is also a $199 per month tier for high-risk pregnancies, for parents who may need closer care.

“Every subscription has complete access to the platform, it's just about whether or not you're prepaying for a bundle of services in advance. Everyone has access to all of the classes, if you join for free you can pay as you go, $10 per session,” she said.

“If you want to send messages and ask questions, you can do that on an individual basis, or at the $20 per month level you get unlimited messaging with anyone in the professional network.”

Hanna said she was inspired to start Mahmee because of her mother Linda, who spent decades as a registered nurse in obstetrics and veteran lactation consultant. Initially, her mother was skeptical of her plan, but saw how dedicated she was to it and decided to hop on board as a co-founder and chief nursing officer.

“Mahmee’s mission is to increase access to comprehensive care for all mothers and babies. We work as an extension of the care team,” Linda said. “In doing that, we help providers listen to mothers, better understand their needs, and stay one step ahead of medical crisis.”

For the first few years, the company needed to gain its footing and expand incrementally to see whether they could enter the maternity healthcare space and truly be effective. Now, they have helped more than 10,000 patients and have secure multiple major partnerships with health systems, hospitals and insurance companies. Fellow co-founder of Mahmee Sunny Walia wanted to make sure that their expansion never resulted in a drop in the quality of care.

In July of 2019, the company announced that they were receiving a huge investment from tennis icon Serena Williams and billionaire Mark Cuban.

“I am incredibly excited to invest and partner with Mahmee, a company that personifies my firm’s investment philosophy.” Williams said via a press release.“Given the bleak data surrounding maternal death and injury rates, I believe that it is absolutely critical right now to invest in solutions that help protect the lives of moms and babies. Mahmee’s data-driven approach is the right solution to one of the most significant problems in the system: that of fragmented care.”

Williams has also been public about her own difficult pregnancy. In her HBO documentary, Being Serena, she spoke about how she had developed a life-threatening pulmonary embolism after complications during childbirth forced her to have a C-section.

“I didn’t expect that sharing our family’s story of Olympia’s birth and all of complications after giving birth would start such an outpouring of discussion from women — especially black women — who have faced similar complications and women whose problems go unaddressed,” she wrote on Facebook under a video of her daughter Olympia.

Additionally, Williams has spoken to multiple media outlets about how lucky she was to have high-quality doctors who listened to her, something many Black women, unfortunately, do not have access to.

Williams’ story and others like it are precisely why Hanna started Mahmee. For too long, she said, maternal healthcare was completely left out of the tech innovation push seen in other medical fields.

“When it comes to maternal healthcare, women — especially Black women — are only being told of issues with their pregnancy in high-stress moments and are often given choices they may not understand,” Hanna said. She added that charting, paperwork and procedures were getting in the way of truly listening to women.

Mahmee has now reached a point where they can look at their large patient base and show the improvements they’ve seen. NICU readmissions for neonatal jaundice fell by 60 percent with their patients, and they escalated almost 1,000 cases of mom's critical care issues to physicians. Some of these cases were life-threatening, involving medical conditions like postpartum hemorrhaging or sepsis.

“There is a massive unmet opportunity to improve maternal and infant outcomes by leveraging both personalized care and tech infrastructure at scale. The Mahmee team brings deep clinical and industry expertise, and are uniquely positioned to be the critical change the healthcare industry needs,” investor Mary Grove said in a press release.

Grove is a partner at Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, which joined with Williams, Cuban and other key investors in backing Mahmee.

With the $3 million in funding they are getting from this round of investments, Mahmee plans to hire more engineers, clinicians and administrative staff members to build out the company’s growing number of partnerships with insurance and healthcare companies. They already have partnerships with 1,000 providers and organizations and plan to keep on growing to help more women.

Over the next few years, Hanna hopes Mahmee can grow even more and start dabbling in public policy. Officials from Mahmee have already spoken to members of Kamala Harris’ and Elizabeth Warren’s campaign. Their hope is that maternal healthcare becomes a more publicized issue and they have already started work with different state and federal advocacy organizations to help modernize the policies and standards of care around maternity and infant healthcare.

While discussing his large investment in Mahmee, Cuban said the company represented the dawn of a new age for maternity healthcare by centralizing records and giving women a catch-all resource for pregnancy,

“My investment reflects my confidence in the strength of this team, and the value of their mission: to fill a major gap in the existing health care system that very few others are tackling,” Cuban said, according to the press release. “This tech solution is helping usher in the future of maternity health care.”

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