Meet the FemTech Founder who Turned a Health Tragedy into Purpose

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Published by Stephen Oluwadara at August 21, 2024

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Kim Smith’s journey is symbolic of turning pain into purpose.

The founder and chief exec of FemTech startup Health Evolve delved into entrepreneurship following a heart-wrenching loss.

Twelve years ago, Smith and her husband visited her in-laws in a rural area in the southeastern U.S. state of South Carolina. She was just over five months pregnant with her first daughter, Lauren Kelly. On the way back home, Smith experienced unbearable pain in the upper right side of her belly and was rushed to the emergency room. After the first ultrasound, they discovered that Lauren’s heartbeat was faint, and by the second ultrasound, she was gone.

Smith’s life was also in danger. She was also diagnosed with HELLP syndrome – a variant of preeclampsia. Her blood pressure was dangerously high 200/100. The doctors told her she could have had a stroke or heart attack if she hadn’t sought medical care.

At the time Smith was 29 years old and had never experienced elevated blood pressure before this incident. Once Smith regained consciousness, she overheard her mother-in-law telling her husband, “Thank God you made it back to Richland County (their residential district) where you could access higher quality care.”

Those words stayed with her for a while. She shuddered, fearing what would have happened if she was still in a rural area. She wasn’t sure if an obstetrician was on-call in the area within an hour of it happening. “I couldn’t stop remembering that so many women in rural, remote areas don’t have a doctor or an obstetrician within their whole county. Who guided those women during critical moments when they were making life-and-death decisions?” Smith told UrbanGeekz in an exclusive interview.

This experience put her on a journey because it was like scales falling off her eyes. Despite working in a hospital for seven years at that point, she didn’t fully understand what birthing women went through until she experienced it. Desperately seeking a creative outlet to contribute to the solution, she searched for organizations that addressed these issues.

“The first company I found was the Preeclampsia Foundation,” Smith said. “And we started volunteering. We advocated for 11 years, volunteering to bring awareness to signs and symptoms. Right after a session I facilitated, a woman who participated experienced health syndrome within an hour of leaving the session, but she knew what was going on because of education.”

With this initiative, Smith presumed the outreach was working. By 2020, she was working as an executive with an academic hospital. Smith didn’t want to stay in the hospital role for long because she felt called to do something bigger. Then, she saw an irritating statistic. In 2022, according to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 49.5 deaths per 100,000 live births and was significantly higher than rates for White (19.0), Hispanic (16.9), and Asian (13.2) women.

Smith said these were the same stats they’ve been fighting against for the last 11 years. She remembered sharing her story with a reporter who interviewed her in 2012. The article was published on USA Today, and it got a lot of buzz about Black maternal health.

“And then in 2023,” she said, “after spending the last decade advocating this issue, it still persists. I volunteered so much that people thought I worked there but didn’t. My family donated so much to these causes, yet it feels like we didn’t even move a needle.”

So Smith decided she wasn’t returning to the broken health care systems, and it was time to do something different. She felt the health system needed to evolve with the changing times.

Launching Health Evolve and Milestones Achieved

She officially launched Health Evolve Technologies in January 2023. Her team named the company’s first app Lauren in honor of her daughter. Lauren is a personalized digital care navigator who helps birthing women manage their blood pressure and stress while receiving customized guidance on heart health and direct support to address the social determinants of health (SDOH) needs.

The patient-driven engagement platform allows pregnant and postpartum women to manage their health goals and get direct access to the resources they need. They also opt-in to share their insights with their existing care team in real-time.

They started in a remote area because of what happened to Smith. They are working with a community-based organization supporting five rural South Carolina counties.

“Three of these counties are maternal care deserts,” Smith said. “This means they don’t have an obstetrician in their county. So, we help them control their blood pressure and access free resources. We have embedded a 24-7 maternal mental health hotline. If there’s a mental health crisis, it’s free. They can access all these resources from the comfort of their home.”

Health Evolve is committed to closing the gap caused by health inequalities by leveraging its diverse team to build technologies that solve significant problems related to health disparities.

Within 60 days of launching the company, Health Evolve was invited to partner with Deloitte as a lead advisor on their Black Maternal Health Research Collaborative.

The company also received a $25,000 grant from the state of South Carolina to build Lauren’s version one. This grant funding helped to assemble a team of developers to work on the MVP.

Another critical milestone is working with a pipeline of interested organizations. “We have a partnership with an academic hospital system,” Smith said, “and we’re working through clinical approval to conduct a validation study of a risk score to make our tool even more meaningful in a hospital setting.”

“There have been so many incredible milestones that have reminded us that we’re doing the right thing,” she continued. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention London Tech Week and the ability to establish a UK entity and build relationships for future collaborations in 2025.”

How Does Lauren Work?

Lauren empowers clients to equip expectant mothers with comprehensive tools, featuring a user-centric app and a secure cloud portal to enhance their birthing experience. These clients are primarily hospitals, insurance companies, state health agencies, and community-based organizations that support birthing women.

On the app, users can track and connect their blood pressure to a device (i.e., a Bluetooth-enabled blood pressure arm cuff) and access resources to reach their goals. Short videos will also be included, giving users a snapshot of their health status and confidence in talking points for communicating with their care team.

The portal also provides information on where users can access healthy food. All that data feeds into the HIPAA-compliant portal, which can be searched specifically for the patient.

For instance, they can say what’s happening with Smith and see her blood pressure track heat. How many times have I logged in? If she’s accessing certain mental health resources, and if specific social needs are popping up. They can respond in real-time instead of waiting for her to go to an emergency room or urgent care, and there’s an emergency.

As Health Evolve iterates on the design, AI-enabled personalization will be introduced. This would enable more proactive and personalized support in-between visits. Suppose the portal indicates that the user needs transportation. In that case, the platform would connect her to a transportation program that would come to her home and take her to her children’s pediatric appointment or whatever the resources are. The Lauren app, a business-to-business product, will be available on App Store and Google Play Store in the coming weeks.

Building For The Black Community and Plans For The Future

Smith shared some crucial strategies she has deployed to serve the Black community. First is learning to build a team that’s sold out on the mission. She believes they don’t have to be full-time. “We work with contractors who do a few hours each week, but they’re all extremely experienced, passionate, and sold out on the vision. We get their best in those few hours and intend to grow to a full-time development team.”

Figure out where key decision makers of a local healthcare ecosystem converge and find a way to penetrate those rooms. Healthcare is local. She believes that if you’re trying to enter a city or country, organizations, community leaders, and influencers in that locality are linked to health care. If Back founders can find out where these people have built trust and you get your name in those rooms, you can invade that ecosystem.

Smith and her team are building for a global audience. “We are experiencing a global crisis that can affect more than 600 million women worldwide,” she said. The team intends to have a presence in the United Kingdom and Africa and use the same template deployed in the UK, where they began by partnering with local health stakeholders in other places.

So far, all of the funding Health Evolve has raised has been 99% non-dilutive. These include grant funds, sponsorships, and incentives. However, they’re conversing with investors on a potential seed round and analyzing what it should be. “We initially talked about half a million just to start,” Smith said. “But considering where we’re going, it may be closer to two to three million for the seed rounds. And we’re looking at the fundraising in late fall 2024 or early 2025.”

Smith believes they’ve just begun to scratch the surface, as they have gone from idea to sketch pad, then genuine partnerships, to piloting Lauren, and now preparing to go to market in 18 incredible months. So they’re not slowing down.

“We are open and excited to draw in more industry partners such as pharmaceutical companies, governmental agencies, and big data companies. We invite you to join us and let this be part of your leadership legacy because it will certainly be part of ours,” she said.