From High-Risk to High-Tech: Revolutionizing Pregnancy Care

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women In Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Women In Motion and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, WBEC-West. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Women In Motion, we have Courtney Williams with Emagine Solutions Technology. Welcome.

Courtney Williams: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be with you, Lee.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m so excited to get caught up with what you got going on. For those who aren’t familiar, can you share a little bit about Emagine Solutions Technology? How are you serving folks?

Courtney Williams: Sure. So, my company is Emagine Solutions Technology as you mentioned, we are on a mission to tackle the U.S. maternal health crisis with technologies to make pregnancy safer, lower cost, and improve outcomes. So, we have a few technologies that we’re working on that all integrate together to make the pregnancy care journey safer for patients and make it easier for providers to take care of them along the way. We have a patient app called the Journey Pregnancy. We have remote patient monitoring software for clinicians. And then, we also have our FDA cleared handheld ultrasound that works on cellphones and tablets.

Lee Kantor: So, what’s your backstory? How’d you get involved in this line of work?

Courtney Williams: So, originally, I got involved in this line of work, I was working a corporate job, and my sister had a really difficult pregnancy, and it really opened my eyes up to the fact that, wow, okay, maternal health can be dangerous, going on a pregnancy journey can actually be a dangerous endeavor, and I didn’t know that before. Luckily, my sister had a great outcome and she and her son are driving today.

Courtney Williams: But, you know, not everybody is so lucky. And the more I dug into this problem, the more sort of obsessed I got with just how the maternal health crisis in the U.S., we’re the most dangerous and expensive place in the developed world to give birth. And as the years go by, it’s actually getting worse. And believe it or not, Arizona – where I am located – is actually the top ten most difficult state in terms of maternal mortality in our nation. And so, being being located here, I wanted to develop technologies to help with this problem.

Lee Kantor: So, your background is in technology, not in kind of maternal care or health?

Courtney Williams: My background is actually in customer analytics. I mean, I worked in customer analytics and finance for Fortune 500 companies when all this started happening. And then, I left the corporate world to sort of start my own business. So, my background is on the business side much more than I’m not a provider at all.

Lee Kantor: So, how did you kind of build the team? Because you needed the technology people, you needed the maternal health care people, how did you kind of weave together the people to build your vision?

Courtney Williams: Absolutely. So, I am fortunate, an avid networker. And I have also a co-founder that he and I founded our company together, and he is the tech expert, so he worked at Google, Roche, Siemens, Philips on the software engineering side. So, I came with all these ideas, like, “Can we do this? Can we build a handheld ultrasound?” And then, we went through the process, found engineers that have this really deep expertise in how to make these ideas come to life.

Courtney Williams: And so, I got together a team and built our advisory board, et cetera, of people that are medical device industry experts as well as on the software side. And I shared my vision with them and they share the same vision, and so together we all have this idea that we want to make maternal health better for patients and for the providers that take care of them. And so, with the shared vision, we’re able to move faster and start developing these products and bring them to market.

Lee Kantor: When there’s such a challenge in the marketplace, how did you prioritize what to attack first?

Courtney Williams: Well, we started with our first technology, which was this handheld ultrasound working on cellphones and tablets because access to radiology can be such a challenge. Something like 50 percent of the world, I think it’s a little more now, I think it’s more like 55 or maybe 60, but no more than that, 60 percent of the world has access to radiology, and we sort of step back and think like, “Oh, my gosh. There are so many communities that are underserved.” And so, initially, when you think of maternal health, one of the first things that you think of is making sure that people have ways to track and and monitor fetal development and growth as a pregnancy journey goes on is an important part of making pregnancy safe, so that was the first technology that we decided to tackle.

Courtney Williams: We interviewed hundreds and hundreds of providers what pain points do they have. I got a National Science Foundation Grant to be able to research the pain points of providers regarding ultrasound. And we developed our solution based on our learnings and then we got our FDA clearance. And then, COVID hit and all of a sudden I was myself in a high risk pregnancy, and I developed preeclampsia in the postpartum period. And I had no way to communicate my condition, my blood pressure, my symptoms, or anything like that with my provider or my care team. And so, that personal experience that I had opened my eyes up to the fact that there is a missing link here between connecting the patient with the provider better. And that was the impetus to start our patient app and our remote patient monitoring technology.

Courtney Williams: And that, to be honest, has really been what’s really been taking off because given this personal experience and then having the experience of working with providers, et cetera, it helped us to develop the technology faster and better because we had built those relationships and we’re able to learn where the pain points were. Does that make sense?

Lee Kantor: Yeah, absolutely. But it’s interesting, the device came first, but it was your pregnancy that really spurred kind of this other side to the coin of working with the patient directly to just get better outcomes with better communication.

Courtney Williams: Absolutely. I don’t know if this is a result of COVID or if this is just how our our med tech industry is trending, but people really want to have more of a role in their healthcare now than they have in years past and in seasons past. And so, having more visibility into our healthcare data and trying to understand the insights so that we can ask better questions of our doctors – because we have so little time with our doctors. The doctors are overworked. They’ve got so many patients. They’ve got their plates full – figuring out how we, as patients, can kind of advocate for ourselves better and have more data going into our doctor’s appointments actually helps our providers. And so, that was one of the things that I learned as a patient. I got to come to my appointments better prepared and ask better questions, because otherwise I’m not going to come away with the knowledge that I need.

Lee Kantor: So, how does your technology help the patient ask better questions and, number one, have access to be able to do that, but also to know what to even ask? Because a lot of patients, you know, they just do what they’re told or they want to avoid the doctor altogether, one or the other, both of which are not great.

Courtney Williams: Right, right. Well, the interesting thing is, with pregnancy, it’s sort of a different setup because for many people going through pregnancy, it’s their first time really dealing with interacting with the medical system, and having to navigate and go to scheduled appointments, et cetera. So, as sort of an entree into the medical system, we, as patients, I’m speaking for myself, we don’t know what we don’t know.

Courtney Williams: So, the way that our app works is, you know, this is a free app and you download it. It’s available on iOS and on Android. And the idea is that in just a few minutes a day, you log and track your maternal health, your pregnancy health, your blood pressure, your blood glucose, your mood, your weight, any number of factors. And then, you have trending data over your pregnancy that you can share with your provider.

Courtney Williams: Why is this important? First, so many apps today that serve pregnant patients are for entertainment, essentially. For example, you’re 30 weeks and your baby is the size of a cantaloupe. That’s great, and that’s entertaining and that’s fun, and that’s helpful to some degree, but it has no way of helping you with your maternal health. And maternal health is the problem that we’re all facing today. There’s a shortage of OB GYNs. The rates of preeclampsia and gestational diabetes, two main complications that can arise, those are going up, 19 percent and 16 percent respectively.

Courtney Williams: And so, the idea here is that this is a tool to give you insights about your health. It gives you a space to log all your questions for your doctor so that you have those ready when you go into your appointment. This is something where you can ask a virtual doula questions on the app, and it will give you immediate answers to any pregnancy, or postpartum, or newborn child rearing question that you might have, that you might not have time to ask your doctor or you might be embarrassed to ask, so these are resources that are available.

Courtney Williams: One more piece here is that you can integrate your Fitbit and/or your blood pressure cuff, if you have a Withings blood pressure cuff. That way, you’re taking your blood pressure and it’ll come right into the app. And if your number is out of the CDC recommended range for pregnancy, it’ll give you an immediate notification, and Say, “Hey, it looks like your numbers are out of range. You should follow up with your doctor.” So, things like preeclampsia, like what happened to me, don’t come up as a surprise to a patient.

Lee Kantor: Right. It seems amazing in today’s time where people have access to a lot more data in real time, that more devices and apps don’t play nicely together to communicate kind of the important things and to help you prioritize this is something to pay attention to. Because when you have data, sometimes the data is overwhelming and you stop seeing it after a while because you see it all the time.

Courtney Williams: Definitely. Yeah. That’s one of the things that, actually, when we’ve been working with the healthcare providers, like doctors, midwives, some of the things that they’ve been saying is – especially doctors – they’re like, “We get alarm fatigue.” If there’s something that’s telling us that there’s something wrong and we get notifications day in and day out that there’s an issue, it kind of leads to you kind of get glazed over, like you were just saying.

Courtney Williams: And so, we built our platform for providers so that they can see their patient’s data in real time, but we’re only letting them know if there’s something really, really urgent that’s happening. And it’s always on the onus of the patient to follow up with their doctor is the way that we have set up our technology to really improve the communication between patient and doctor, and not add more burden to doctors who already kind of don’t have enough time on their plate.

Lee Kantor: So, now, is this up and going? Where are you at in the growth of the business? Is this an ongoing concern or is this an idea that you’ve just launched or are you at a startup? Like, where are you at in your kind of life cycle?

Courtney Williams: Definitely. This is live. Thousands of people have downloaded our app, The Journey Pregnancy, and are using it this year. Right now, we’ve provided hundreds and hundreds of blood pressure alerts to patients whose blood pressure have gone above that recommended range for pregnancy, of that 140 over 90. And that means more patients have been more informed about their risks in pregnancy and have followed up with their doctors. We have a number of different clinics that are already onboard and using this technology with their patients. We’re just getting ready to onboard a new federally qualified health center. And this is something that is actively helping both patients and their providers have safer pregnancies.

Lee Kantor: So, what was it like when you launched and it was live in all of the app stores, and people were downloading it and they’re using it, and you got that first signal where somebody has now just been signaled that something’s up, and then they’re going to react, what was that like for your team to see it actually helping someone?

Courtney Williams: The first sign that we had that was like maybe this is some good product market fit, that magic thing that all startups are looking for was, my husband was at the movies with some friends, and he texted me, he’s like, “Oh, my gosh. You will not believe what happened. I was in the theater and I looked over, and there was somebody on their phone and they were using the app.” And I was just like, all right, wow, that right there shows you that this is something that is helping people. People are finding it. It’s striking a chord in a sense of giving a tool to somebody to be able to manage their pregnancy. So, that was the first sign like, oh, things are starting to click.

Lee Kantor: Now, you mentioned having a robust network and networking is important to you, how was that in terms of getting funding for the startup? Because the venture you’re doing is not something that a lot of people can bootstrap, like this requires a lot of resources.

Courtney Williams: Oh, definitely. Right. So, there’s sort of two different ways to go about building – well, I saw two different ways to go about building this. So, first, we have been bootstrapping for as long as humanly possible. We are extraordinarily careful with how we deploy the capital that we have invested. So, bootstrapping was the first way. But then, you can only get so far with bootstrapping, like you’re indicating, especially for something that’s in digital health where you’re having to deal with regulatory systems or software development. Unless you have the expertise and the specific time to do it, a software development can be a huge cost driver.

Courtney Williams: So, we saw two paths. One, venture funding, and two, non-dilutive capital. And as much as I would have loved to just go right to an angel group and say here’s my ask, here’s how much I need, this is what I want to build, that would have been a great route to start off with, but actually I chose the non-dilutive funding route. So, going after as many grants as possible to fund our innovation. I did that for two reasons, and we continue to be grant funded right now actually.

Courtney Williams: I’ve done this for two reasons, because first, getting grants provides credibility through the organization. We’ve gotten grants through Department of Health and Human Services, through National Science Foundation. And I believe that the credibility and the knowledge that those organizations bring to us is invaluable. And so, that then raises the level of our startup, I do believe.

Courtney Williams: Secondly, we’ve gone after grants and non-dilutive funding because, as I’ve mentioned, we’ve been really, really careful about how we deploy our capital, because when you’re doing digital health, there are all these unexpected surprises that come along the way anytime you have a software project. So, I think that grant reporting is very strenuous and it’s very exacting. And I think that discipline that working with grants brings makes us a more valuable company, and it makes us more frugal in the areas that we need to be frugal. And it helps for the overall longevity of a company like ours that can take some time to take off.

Lee Kantor: Right. And it seems like when you’re working with a grant, it’s almost like an endorsement from them when they give you a grant. So then, you can use that as that social proof you need that we must be onto something, these people have given us a grant for it.

Courtney Williams: Absolutely. Yes, 100 percent. Especially getting federal funding, it’s extraordinarily competitive to get these grants that are called SBIR, Small Business Innovation Research. And we’ve gotten phase one grants through National Science Foundation for SBIR. We’re now in a phase two grant SBIR. And each of these has been an important milestone to validate what we’re doing, so that’s absolutely the case.

Lee Kantor: Now, who is your ideal customer? Are they hospitals or just the general public to download the app? Who do you need more partnerships with?

Courtney Williams: Yes is the answer. Our thesis, really, in growing our company is that we want to partner with as many different entities in the spectrum of maternal health as possible, because no one entity is going to make the U.S. maternal health crisis go away. We’re going to have to partner for this issue to be tackled. So, our first primary focus is on the patients with our patient app, making it accessible to people, making our patient app free, a tool that anybody can use if they so choose.

Courtney Williams: The primary people that use our app are first time pregnant parents as well as those with a risk profile. So, somebody like me, for example, I know I have predisposition to preeclampsia and hypertension and pregnancy. This is the app. I’ve used my own app in my own pregnancy to be able to monitor my health. So, somebody like that.

Courtney Williams: Secondarily, also, our target is innovative OB-GYNs and healthcare providers that want to have more visibility into how their patient’s health is between visits. And so, our technology is enabling those doctors to see between these visits, how their patient’s blood pressure is, how their mood is, what symptoms they’re experiencing, et cetera. So, those are the main focuses.

Courtney Williams: Down the line, we hope to make more connections with hospitals and more integrated delivery networks, and eventually the insurance folks that provide the payer plans. But that’s down the road. And right now, we’re really just focusing on serving patients the best that we can to have them feel safe in their pregnancies.

Lee Kantor: Now, why was it important for you to become part of the WBEC-West community? What did you hope to get out of it and what have you gotten out of it?

Courtney Williams: So, first of all, going through the certification process is, I think, an important activity and an important milestone for any verified business. The rigor of getting certified, I think, is a great exercise for leveling up your business. And these were all steps that we needed to do anytime we apply for a federal grant is to to go through something similar to the certification process. So, we’ve already been through this sort of rigor, I would say, for the startup and we’re ready for this.

Courtney Williams: And we serve women and their families, and an organization that certifies women in their businesses so that they can have access to more opportunities, there’s a lot of alignment there. There are a lot of businesses that see the value of women-led teams, women-owned businesses as value drivers. There’s lots of different publications out about how women-owned businesses deploy capital in a really, really strategic way compared to their counterparts, and I believe that we reflect that.

Courtney Williams: WBENC has all sorts of different opportunities to connect with other types of industries, and it has given me an opportunity to think differently about my business and how we can serve women that go through the pregnancy journey that maybe aren’t in the healthcare space. So, for example, offering this as a workplace benefit. There’s so many different ways that this networking has opened my mind as a business owner and has helped me learn from others who are excelling in their businesses in different industries.

Lee Kantor: Now, any advice for the listener out there who might be thinking of starting their own business? Like, how do you balance being a founder and having a family, and kind of creating that equilibrium that allows you to live a fruitful life?

Courtney Williams: I’m learning that as I go. Through my startup journey since I started my business, I’ve actually had two high risk pregnancies, and I’ve gotten preeclampsia twice, and given birth twice. And so, having really super young kids and newborns while being a startup founder, while managing sort of being chief medical officer of my family, but also being chief executive officer of my company, managing my time has been the most important piece that I can figure out. So, I’m extraordinarily careful about how I block my time. And I literally set calendar reminders on my calendar for everything, not just business appointments, but personal things as well.

Courtney Williams: I set a reminder to myself, a calendar invite to myself to do yoga, to go to the gym, for family events so that I am present both for my business and I am also present for my family, and I’m also present for myself, and make sure to work in time to take care of my own health. Because if I don’t take care of my health, nobody will. That’s on us. But us, as women founders, we often have a lot of other hats that we’re carrying, so my strategy has been to manage my calendar so that I can be sure to manage these priorities.

Lee Kantor: Now, if somebody wants to learn more about the app or Emagine Solutions Technology, the website, what’s the best way to connect?

Courtney Williams: There are lots of ways that you can connect with us. We are on the web at emaginest.com. You can find us on TikTok, @thejourneypregnancy. We’re also on Instagram, @emaginestech. One plug I’ll say is, we’re actually embarking on a really exciting and innovative research project right now where we are recruiting folks that are currently pregnant to participate in a research study that’s funded by National Science Foundation. They can get all sorts of blood pressure monitoring technology and a free Fitbit, as well as a digital gift card for participating and, really, being a part of the cutting edge of some new technology that’s coming out. And so, if you know anybody that’s currently going through the pregnancy journey, if you please refer them to our website or even to send us a direct message on Instagram or on TikTok to participate in the study, we would love to connect.

Lee Kantor: And they can be at any stage of the pregnancy, like halfway through or just starting, it doesn’t matter?

Courtney Williams: Yeah, that’s absolutely the case. Yeah, we’re recruiting particularly during the first trimester, but we have bandwidth to to accept people that are further along.

Lee Kantor: Well, congratulations on all the success and the momentum. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Courtney Williams: Well, thank you so much for shining a light on maternal health. This is an issue that touches all of us. Maternal health isn’t just for people that are pregnant, but it’s also for a reflection of our community. We’ve got to take care of the people that are bringing on the next generation in order for us to have a healthy society. So, thank you for shining a light on maternal health and for giving me the opportunity to meet with you today.

Lee Kantor: All right. Courtney, thank you for sharing your story. All right. This is Lee Kantor, we’ll see you all next time on Women In Motion.