Lessons from the Front Lines of Women’s Health Innovation

In a recent post, I talked about some of the unique challenges that innovators face in the women’s health space. As I wrap up this series, I want to leave you with a few key lessons we’ve learned at Wildflower Health over more than a decade of building, evolving, and growing in this space.

Follow the Money (Yes, It’s Complicated in Healthcare)

This one may sound obvious, but it’s worth repeating, understanding the money flow in healthcare is essential. I’ve met many bright, passionate healthcare entrepreneurs with fantastic ideas—but they hit a wall when it comes to monetization. Why? Because the economics of healthcare are anything but straightforward.

In women’s health especially, the flow of dollars can be confusing, with different players—payers, providers, patients—often having competing incentives. It’s incredibly helpful to understand how money already moves through the system and find ways your innovation can plug into those channels (like reimbursable claims or existing value-based care programs). And if you can’t fit into those streams? You’ll need a very clear, compelling ROI story to create a new funding path.

Here are a few hard-earned insights:

• Avoid providers as a primary funding source. OB/GYN services generally aren’t big revenue drivers for health systems, which makes it tough to build a business by asking them to fund innovation. One notable exception is OB Hospitalist Group, which has found a sweet spot by helping health systems solve big staffing challenges for OB hospitalists and thereby creating a major value prop for hospital leaders to get behind.
• Get to know your payers inside and out. At Wildflower, we built a strong tech solution early on—but convincing health plans to carve out discretionary budgets for digital tools was a constant challenge. So we adapted, expanding our capabilities to help manage Total Cost of Care episodes for OB and Newborn. That helped us build a stronger ROI case with real data (and risk for savings) behind it.
• Leverage existing claims and contracts. Most care is still paid through traditional fee-for-service (FFS) claims. These may not be super high-margin, but they’re one of the lowest-friction ways to get started. Many important care gaps in women’s health can be addressed with in-network services. Look at companies like Midi and Visana—both found smart ways to offer much-needed care and get it paid for through insurance. At Wildflower, we saw that clients struggled with out-of-network billing for lactation services, so we created the largest in-network virtual and in-person lactation network in the country. Everyone wins: patients, payers, and the providers.

Stay Focused—But Make Room to Grow

A lot of women’s health startups begin with a personal story—and I think that’s amazing. Wildflower was born from my own frustration with the care I received during recurrent miscarriages. But as meaningful as that issue was to me, I knew it wasn’t a big enough market to build a business on.

It’s natural to start narrow, but it’s important to think ahead. Too many companies stay stuck in small niche markets, which leads to what investors call “point solutions.” That can limit your ability to raise funds or land major customers. Look for opportunities to expand thoughtfully. One example: our partner ProgenyHealth began by building out a best-in-class NICU care management solution with clear ROI, and has over time moved upstream to adapt that solution for maternity care management —smart scaling, while staying true to their mission and building on their core capabilities.

Also, keep in mind: many large buyers (like health plans) are trying to consolidate vendors. That means they’ll be more interested if you can solve multiple problems. At Wildflower, that’s pushed us to grow beyond just software—to value-based care tools, and now, network solutions for ancillary services. We’ve kept our focus on improving maternal and newborn care, and we’re careful not to overreach, but we have a big enough scope of services that we can continue to grow substantively year after year.

Dream Big, Stay Practical

Balancing vision with pragmatism is one of the toughest parts of innovating in healthcare. We need bold dreams—but we also need to survive the long, winding road to get there. That means building solutions that can create value today, while keeping your eyes on a more transformative future.

Take our friends at Frame Fertility. They are changing the game by diagnosing fertility issues earlier in the OB office—before patients are sent down the IVF path to make sure patients get on the right diagnostic pathway. Big vision, right? But they also saw an opportunity to help Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility (REI) clinics operate more efficiently with their solution set, and they’ve used that as a stepping stone and complementary growth strategy to enable their long-term vision.

At Wildflower, we’re strong believers in value-based care. But we’ve learned that it takes time—sometimes years—to close those contracts and prove outcomes. So we’ve designed a flexible business model that includes software, data services, and even FFS billing, all while working toward a more value-driven system.

More than anything, it’s important to stay tapped into your passion and purpose for fixing our broken healthcare system and how it impacts women’s health, quality of life, and longevity.  It is not a journey for the faint of heart, but it’s a fight worth fighting, and I hope some of these ideas and lessons learned from our experience will help spark and sustain the next wave of women’s health innovators.