She Matters Is Improving Maternal Health for Black Women Through Culturally Competent Coaching

When Jade Kearney had her first child, she came face to face with the staggering healthcare crisis facing Black women in America. Now she’s built a maternal health platform that provides community support for under-represented women and cultural competency coaching for physicians.

Challenge

America has a maternal health crisis. More specifically, America has a Black maternal health crisis. More women die in childbirth in America than in any other high-income country and if you are a Black woman in America, the mortality rate is twice as high as the average and three times higher than that of a white woman.

These statistics are widely known and yet the problem keeps getting worse. From 2018 to 2020, the maternal mortality rate for Black women increased from 37 deaths per 100,000 live births to 55.3 deaths. COVID only exacerbated the problem; pregnant women with COVID were more likely to experience complications and people of color were at greatest risk in the pandemic because of health inequities. If you are a Black woman in the United States, you are more likely to take public transportation, have no or limited paid time off when you are sick, lack access to healthcare, and have pre-existing conditions that increase the risks if you contract COVID.

Jade Kearney knew these statistics when she became pregnant with her first child. At the time, she was pursuing a master’s degree in digital media at NYU, intending to use her background as an academic director to create tools for teachers. She never thought she’d create a digital health platform for Black mothers. Then her daughter was born.

“I made it through pregnancy, through preeclampsia. I hemorrhaged during delivery. I made it through all of that. I thought the hard work was done. But really for me, the hard work started postpartum,” says Kearney.

When Kearney experienced postpartum anxiety OCD, she struggled to find the support and medical care she needed. A healthcare provider prescribed her Zoloft and told her to check in after six weeks, not understanding the stigma around antidepressants in the Black community and the hesitations a Black mother might have to start such a drug. Even friends and family failed to understand what she was going through.

“Black women do not talk about pain,” says Kearney. “We try to fit the strong Black woman stereotype. Suffering is expected as part of the journey and we suffer in silence.”

This stigma partially explains why Black women are twice as likely as white women to experience maternal mental health (MMH) conditions — like anxiety, depression, OCD — but half as likely to receive any type of care. And it’s a vicious cycle: when doctors fail Black women in maternal care, it becomes harder for these women to turn to them when they need help after the baby comes.

“There’s a distrust of the medical system,” explains Kearney. “It’s rooted in all sorts of things historically, even not being fully transparent about mental illness because of fear your children might be taken away.”

Origin Story

Kearney wanted more for herself and other Black women experiencing postpartum mental health challenges. She wanted community. She wanted a culturally competent healthcare provider who understood the particular challenges she experienced in the medical system. She wanted better outcomes for women like her in America.

“Sometimes with all the statistics, you say the word ‘Black’ so much that you forget that this is an American problem,” says Kearney. “We are American, and the American healthcare system is failing us.”

Kearney decided to bring Black mothers together at the table to discuss the challenges of mental health in their community. She put together a brunch event and didn’t know if anyone would come. The brunch sold out in two hours. The moms ranged in age from 20 to 65 but all shared the same desire to connect over their experiences navigating maternal care.

A few themes emerged from this brunch, themes that helped shape the initial idea for She Matters. First, these moms wanted better words and terminology to describe what they were going through. They wanted a resource that helped them frame their experience in such a way that they got the care they needed. On the flip side, they felt like therapists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals needed to make the effort to understand them better so they could provide more help.

Galvanized by the conversations she was having with other mothers, Kearney conceived of an app that would provide the tools women like her needed and the tools providers needed to provide better care to their patients. She developed the first iteration of She Matters as her digital media thesis project at NYU. The project took off from there, landing in NYU’s accelerator program and raising its first pre-seed funding, before making into the Techstars program in 2021.

In the beginning, She Matters focused on postpartum mental healthcare for Black women, working to connect them to culturally sensitive therapists and training mental health professionals to better understand the nuances of working with this population. Over the course of their time in Techstars, the model expanded to other aspects of Black maternal care, like the two biggest comorbidities Black women experience: preeclampsia and hemorrhaging. They now offer coaching to entire healthcare networks and hospitals, to ensure culturally competent care for Black women before, during, and after delivery.

Under the Hood

She Matters is a digital health platform that supports Black mothers by providing access to community, culturally relevant resources, and culturally competent healthcare providers. Additionally, it operates as a learning management system (LMS) for physicians and healthcare systems through its coaching platform that provides certification and continuing medical education (CME) credit. It’s an enterprise solution, working with whole hospital networks to make sure their labor and delivery departments are culturally competent.

She Matters is also a telehealth platform that connects women to certified therapists and culturally competent healthcare providers for appointments. Women can log in, find a provider, make an appointment, and do a video visit, all on the app. It takes health insurance and Medicaid and also has more than 2000 hours of volunteer hours from mental health professionals it can offer to those without insurance. They are building out the telehealth capabilities of the app and have other features, like a symptom tracker, in the pipeline.

“These features will help us with our goal of improving communication between those with lived experience and healthcare providers.”

To that end, She Matters provides feedback to hospitals via survey responses from their Black patients, improving practices by tracking patient outcomes. Their surveys have an 86% response rate on average, and this high rate makes for a big impact in regards to patient safety, patient experience, and addressing health equity gaps.

As Kearney explains, “Being a Black woman in the healthcare system is lonely and scary. The surveys help validate this experience. And then we can bring this feedback to hospitals and hold their feet to the fire to do better for their patients.”

Doing better for these patients represents huge possible savings for insurance companies and hospitals. Maternal mental health conditions represent $18.1B in readmission costs, not to mention the $7.5B in readmission cost for hypertension or the $4.8B in costs associated with gestational diabetes. It’s a relatively untapped market with few existing solutions.

“Raising [funds for She Matters] is very personal to me,” says Kearney. “I can connect this to an ROI. There’s money here and it’s lucrative and it’s a good business decision, but it’s also just the right thing to do. Black women are dying and we can change that.”

She Matters closed a $1.5M pre-seed round in August 2022 and is growing out their team to expand their user community and physician training. Their goal is to be in 80% of US hospitals in the next five years, beginning with areas where there are currently legislative mandates for Black maternal mental healthcare training and maternal care deserts with limited access to care.

“When a Black woman sees the She Matters shield on a hospital, I want her to know that there is someone in that place who understands her experience and will do everything possible for her to come out. The shield means safety.”

Why We’re Proud to Invest

StartUp Health is proud to back the She Matters platform because its co-founders, Jade Kearney and Marguerite Pierce, have the knowledge, education, vision, and lived experience to bring better maternal healthcare to America, saving lives and preventing costly hospital readmissions. By approaching the problem from both the patient side and the physician side, they form a bridge of communication and trust from which real change can happen.

We’re also excited to back this team because the She Matters cultural competency course was developed in-house, drawing on Kearney’s background in intercultural/multicultural and diversity studies at Georgetown University. Not only is she an educator who understands how people learn, but she is a Black mother who understands how the system fails women like her. She and Pierce, her COO, have walked through maternal mental health issues and come out the other side and know personally what the medical community needs to understand about treating Black women.

Though rooted in their own experience, the She Matters team has an expansive vision to provide culturally competent care to all types of people. In the near future, they plan to launch ‘We Matter,’ a health platform that offers cultural competency courses and resources for the LGBTQ+ community, as well as products that address the needs of Latina women and Native women. As Kearney says, “We all deserve to experience motherhood from a place of safety without shame.”

Join us in welcoming She Matters to the StartUp Health family!

Learn more and connect with the She Matters team via email.

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She Matters Is Improving Maternal Health for Black Women Through Culturally Competent Coaching was originally published in StartUp Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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