2.28-29.24-Ethics-Nurtur

BINDU CHANAGALA: Hi. I'm Bindu Chanagala, Co-found and Chief Product Officer of nurtur. And I recently graduated with an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. And that is where I met my Co-founder Kristen Ellefson, who is the CEO of nurtur. And our journey has been enhanced with the addition of Dr. Frasch, who actually built the world's leading algorithm in predicting postpartum depression. We are grateful for the MIT ecosystem, especially grateful for the delta v experience that we've had this past summer.

Now let's talk about the problem that we are trying to tackle. There are 6 million pregnancies in the US every year. One in 5 result in maternal mental health disorder. 85% women are undiagnosed and untreated, causing societal burden and cost of $14 billion. Now let's think about this. Roughly, we have 1 million women. The current situation in the US, where they are suffering through postpartum depression silently without adequate resources.

And now these high-risk, vulnerable women will go about wanting to schedule mental health appointments. And they end up on wait lists from anywhere from several months to up to a whole year. We do not have adequate clinicians to support the need and the demand of today. And that brings us to an unsettling truth that mental health is the leading cause of death in pregnant moms. And also, this problem is getting worse. We've spoken to hundreds of women who are blindsided by postpartum depression, and I'm one of those.

And the severe cases of postpartum depression can also lead to suicide. We spoke to Tyler Sutton who lost his wife to suicide after experiencing the tragedy of postpartum depression. He said resources should be presented to people in the earlier stages of pregnancy, not just when issues start to occur, when doctors dread actually uncovering postpartum depression cases because they do not have resources and they do not know where to direct these women and protocols that define that.

That is why we built nurtur. nurtur is the only digital health application that predicts postpartum depression. And by using machine learning algorithms, we use nine factors that include medical history and demographic information that is used for initial screening when women walk into the doors of ob-gyn offices.

The accuracy of this model is 0.91 area under the curve. And this is an equitable way to provide this service because 40% of new moms actually miss their postpartum checkup that happens six weeks after birth. And these numbers are even higher for women of color that come from low-income families.

We didn't want to stop there. We predict. Then what next? We wanted to prevent postpartum depression by providing self-guided therapy chatbot using generative AI. This is a clinically proven protocol and also recommended by US Preventive Services Task Force. We use large language models to deploy five-minute modules every single day for 28 days. And it's also a scalable solution. This could be translated into several languages, serving diverse population.

Now let's talk about the chatbot itself. Think of ChatGPT or Gemini in reverse. nurtur has its defined prompts. We deliver five-minute modules on daily basis, and we have a human in the loop just in case if there are triggering conversations happening where a human has to jump on a call immediately with a mom. For the most part, we work with moms hopefully in a healthy mind. But you just never know. So we want to make sure we have a human in the loop to address some rare situations and concerns like this.

Our initial use case is our beachhead market, ob-gyn clinics. At 22 weeks pregnancy, every woman that goes to an ob-gyn clinic will take our prediction survey. And then the high-risk women are directed towards our self-directed therapy. This is just the beginning. We are thinking of adjacent markets like peer-to-peer mentorship, group therapy, medication management, and also significant-other support.

This is our traction. Our initial test uses showed 96% adherence, and we've been getting inbound sales opportunities from different market segments. Three clinics are eager to implement nurture pilots. And we are happy to report that we are currently busy getting ready for our first pilot kick off on April 1.

We are looking for partnerships at ob-gyn clinics or departments within hospitals, the decision makers there, and also who are the ob-gyn department heads. We do want to nail down the commercialization strategy, reimbursement, concepts within the payers. So any payers out there would like to work with us, please come and see us. And we've gotten an inbound sales opportunity from an employer benefit plans that we are having some pricing conversations, because think about it. Women actually experience absenteeism after having a baby. And employers are curious to help their female employees.

And MIT community out there, we always have internship opportunities. So please come and see us. nurtur can't do this alone. We are trying to tackle the foremost challenge in women's health today. Please join us in making a meaningful impact in millions of lives of women and their families. Thank you.