Maven Founder and CEO Kate Ryder recently sat down with the hosts of “A Healthy Dose” to talk innovation, storytelling, and what it means to put women and families at the center of healthcare. Kate joined Steve Kraus, Healthcare Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, and Trevor Price, Founder/CEO of Oxeon Partners & General Partner at Town Hall Ventures, for their popular healthcare industry podcast.

In diving into her path from journalist to venture capitalist to founder and CEO of Maven, Kate spoke about why storytelling is an entrepreneurial superpower and the importance of listening when it comes to creating meaningful, useful products:

“I love listening to what the stories are and then crafting a solution to the problems.”

Kate shared her vision for transforming women’s and family healthcare through Maven, and talked through the ways that we’re working to do that every day with providers, employers, health plans, and members. She shared insights about some of the key trends we’re seeing in the market that are driving our innovations for family benefits, including global access parity and diverse paths to parenthood.

Give Kate’s episode of ‘A Healthy Dose’ a listen here!

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“Women and families should be at the center of healthcare models. If you improve their care, you improve the system.” - Maven Founder & CEO Kate Ryder at HLTH 2019

What a week it was at HLTH! Maven loved being part of the excitement as 6,000 attendees from all different facets of the healthcare industry and other diverse sectors came together to discuss the future of healthcare. Our team returned energized from the many engaging and insightful conversations about comprehensive family benefits, virtual health, inclusive support for diverse paths to parenthood, and women in healthcare.

Maven’s CEO and Founder Kate Ryder took the stage for a panel moderated by Tina Reed, FierceHealthcare’s Executive Editor, called “Cooking Up Winning Care Models: The Evolution of Traditional Care Settings,” alongside other leaders who are working to fill gaps in traditional healthcare through innovative, high-touch models: Sachin Jain, President and CEO of CareMore Health, Tom X Lee of Galileo, and Chris Miller of Paladina Health.

In the spirit of making sure that all of the critical conversations that happened in Vegas do not stay in Vegas, we wanted to share a few of the top learnings and takeaways that Maven’s team are sharing back from HLTH.

Let’s all focus on getting more women leaders in healthcare.  

What a fantastic way to kickoff the conference with a dive into Oliver Wyman’s new survey on women in healthcare leadership. While women make 80% of buying and usage decisions in healthcare, a whopping 87% of C-suite executives in the industry are men. This theme of closing the gender gap in healthcare was common throughout HLTH. This gap is one of the key reasons why Maven was founded: to develop a healthcare solution that puts women and families at the center—something that our Founder & CEO Kate Ryder emphasized in her panel at HLTH.

Technology should never replace human touch.

It was great to build so many conversations around keeping healthcare human while continuing to spearhead meaningful technological advancement. One theme discussed by quite a few panelists stands out because it’s so fundamental to our approach: technology should complement, not replace, human care. We love being part of conversations around how to better bridge digital health and in-person care to drive outcomes, lower costs, improve patient experiences, and ensure continuity of care.

Employers are innovators in the health benefits landscape.

We’re excited to see the shift to framing and recognizing employers, HR benefits leaders, and brokers as “innovators” in the health benefits landscape. We see this innovative thinking and interest in pushing healthcare options that are ahead of the curve in working with employers every day. Their commitment to keep up with the latest innovations in order to deliver the best possible care to their employees inspires us, and it’s nice to see the industry more broadly recognizing their forward-thinking.

Culturally-sensitive care matters.

One of the themes that emerged quite a bit through panels and conversations is an emphasis on culturally-sensitive care for people around the world, but also state-by-state in the U.S. Variations in culture ranging from norms to technological adoption to access to key services or traditional experiences in the healthcare system are critical for healthcare solutions to dive into. As a family benefits solution working with parents and employers all over the world and across the states, delivering culturally-sensitive care is absolutely critical and something we’re constantly working to improve upon through our Care Advocates and the providers in our virtual network.  

As we continue working toward our mission of transforming women’s and family healthcare by providing end-to-end family benefits solutions that support any path to parenthood, we look forward to continuing to meet in these amazing spaces with clinical thought leaders, doctors, employers, health plans, investors, other digital health companies, and more.

If you missed us at HLTH, we’d still love to speak with you! Reach out now to learn more about Maven.  

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Maven has been named to the CB Insights inaugural Digital Health 150 ranking, which lists the most promising digital health companies in the world. Maven is thrilled to be recognized among other leading digital health startups driving innovation, changing care delivery models, and improving outcomes.

CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal revealed the Digital Health 150 during Future of Health, a gathering of top healthcare leaders, in New York this morning. “It’s a privilege to use CB Insights’ data to identify and shine a light on these companies, and we look forward to tracking their success in 2019 and beyond,” said Sanwal.

Maven’s place on the Digital Health 150 comes just weeks after Founder & CEO Kate Ryder was named to Inc. Magazine’s 2019 Female Founders 100—recognizing the women building America’s most innovative and ambitious businesses. Inc. highlighted Maven’s revolutionary approach to on-demand, holistic women’s and family health, and unique benefits solution that is, as Inc. wrote, “helping leading companies retain their most valuable asset: employees”.

For the Digital Health 150, CB Insights’ research team used an evidence-based approach to select the startups based on several factors including patent activity, investor quality, news sentiment analysis, proprietary Mosaic scores, market potential, partnerships, competitive landscape, team strength, and tech novelty. The Mosaic Score, based on CB Insights’ algorithm, measures the overall health and growth potential of private companies to help predict a company’s momentum.

Check out the full Digital Health 150 list here.

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