Simmone Taitt wants to eliminate inequalities in maternal health

February 24, 2022

CHARACTERISTIC

Simmone Taitt of Poppy Seed Health wants to eliminate inequalities in maternal health

Real-time health promotion app offers a virtual best friend no matter where users are in their pregnancy journey

Simmone Taitt isn’t afraid of rabbit holes. As founder and CEO of Poppy Seed Health – an on-demand health promotion app for people giving birth and providing pregnancy and postpartum care – Taitt digs deep no matter how deep a subject may be dark or scary or in the weeds.

“I’ve never been afraid to explore,” says Taitt. “It’s the one thing that’s ingrained in my DNA: I don’t mind asking questions and I don’t mind trying new things.”

In a career that has taken her from the nascent world of retail to the emerging world of technology, Taitt is proud to go from “day zero to day 1”. For poppy seed healthday zero was the day she learned the shocking and unfortunate news that she had lost her first pregnancy.

“I was in my doctor’s office and we couldn’t find a heartbeat,” Taitt recalled of the first-trimester appointment when his doctor broke the news. “I left that appointment without any medical, emotional or mental support. I was just looking for information. So I went online.”

After several rabbit holes led her to discover a doula message board — a forum she affectionately calls a “virtual bear hug” — she made the decision to become a doula herself, and the seed grew. was planted for what would become Poppy Seed Health.

What started as a simple need for information after Taitt’s first of multiple pregnancy losses soon turned into something more. She began her journey to becoming a birth doula trained by DONA and a full spectrum doula trained by Former Song Doula Services, which emphasizes reproductive rights and birth justice. As a practitioner of the emerging movement – ​​which aims to address inequalities in pregnancy-related health care for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities – she supports others on their journey from conception to post-pregnancy. partum, and pregnancy and infant. loss. “I wanted to be boots in the field,” she says. “I needed to figure out for myself the shortcomings of maternal health care.”

“Everything that I’ve done personally as a doula, between my own lived experiences and what I’m going through with my own clients, informs Poppy,” says Taitt. “From how we built the technology to how the app looks.”

Launched exclusively on the App Store in April 2021, and recently featured as a App of the day, Poppy Seed Health offers 24/7 access to a diverse network of doulas, midwives and nurses for childbirth, postpartum, pregnancy and infant loss . To ensure users are matched with an appropriate attorney for their particular needs, Poppy has introduced matching algorithms to know where a user is in their journey from pregnancy to postpartum. Soon, the app will match users with healthcare providers based on preferences such as race, ethnicity, languages ​​spoken, and LGBTQIA+ identification.

Additionally, 50% of Poppy’s hundreds of advocates identify as BIPOC, queer, trans, and a wide range of intersectionality in between.

“It’s really the magic of what’s happening in the background,” says Taitt. “Users don’t get just anyone, they get the person who can meet them right where they are when they need help the most.”

According to American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, about 26% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, 80% of which occur in the first trimester. Worldwide, approximately 23 million miscarriages occur each year. In BIPOC communities, these numbers can be significantly higher. A 2021 study of seven countries conducted by The Lanceta peer-reviewed medical journal, found that Black women have a 43% higher risk of miscarriage.

Poppy Seed Health’s emphasis on diversity is intentional. It builds a layer of accessibility into the app that Taitt and her team decided early on to be its core offering: helping birthers who need emotional, mental and wellness support wherever they find themselves in their journey. It was vital to Taitt that Poppy’s price be affordable for all users, and so for every member paying the monthly subscription price of $29, the app is able to provide free access to a user who is receiving Medicaid. . Today, 30% of people who use Poppy Seed Health are on Medicaid, and 75% of users visit the app’s free evidence-based library.

Barely a year after its official launch, Poppy Seed Health is still in its infancy. Today, it’s one of many apps available on the App Store focused on pregnancy-related health with a focus on addressing existing inequalities in healthcare, such as Irtha Yelp-like platform that offers prenatal, childbirth, postpartum, and pediatric care assessments for black and brown people giving birth.

While her journey into technology and becoming an app founder may seem unconventional, Taitt has no problem calling her the line: her passion for selling is also her passion for connecting and establishing relationships with people, and to solve problems together.

“I went from bugging the starter and loving the tech to building it myself,” says Taitt. “And understanding that technology is so much more important than the people who actually build it. It’s the whole ecosystem that comes together to make technology accessible.

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Apple

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Apple

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