J'Vanay Santos knew she did not want to go into accounting after getting a degree in the field, so she decided to take over a failing bodega on Albany Street in Schenectady instead.
Daily sales for that bodega – Fabio Grocery – grew about 10 times over three years before she sold it in 2019.
Now, in another big career change, Santos is the CEO and co-founder of a software startup dedicated to maternal health care. The startup’s digital app has been designed with a particular focus on people from groups that are generally underserved – an issue that she learned more about as a bodega owner.
“I realized there were a lot of system issues at play, from food scarcity, blatant lack of resources, drug addiction – and that really fueled my passion for serving and creating solutions for marginalized and vulnerable populations,” Santos said.
MyLÚA Health is a digital maternal care platform focused on improving prenatal and postpartum health care as well as patient education.
The app works by using AI to analyze a mother’s health care information to assess her risk for pregnancy comorbidities, which physicians and other maternal care workers can see through their side of the app.
The app collects three types of patient data. That includes info inputted by the user, vitals gathered from a remote patient monitoring device like a blood pressure cuff or a weight scale, and data from electronic medical records.
MyLÚA Health is working on a pilot of the app with St. Peter’s Health Partners, which is owned by Michigan-based Trinity Health.
Product testing is being completed at St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany, and then a patient pilot will be completed there, as well as at Samaritan Hospital in Troy and an undecided third Trinity hospital.
“We do a successful pilot, it sets us up for rapid acceleration across their entire network, and Trinity health is the sixth-largest health system in the country,” said Michael Conward, chief technology officer and co-founder of MyLÚA Health.
The startup is continuing to make connections in the maternal health care industry, with the goal of launching commercially next spring, Santos said. The plans is to sell to health systems at first and then include health plans as part of the next business model.
Santos decided to get involved in the maternal health care industry after seeing how her sister was treated by health care providers during her pregnancy.
“Her journey was not easy,” Santos said. “I have seen five births, and hers was not correct. According to the other births, she didn't have as much medical intervention as she would have liked.”
As Santos was researching potential reasons behind this, she discovered a big discrepancy in the quality of maternal health care often experienced by Black women and other women of color.
Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Santos met Conward during the pandemic, and he decided to join the effort in tackling the health disparities.
“We want to be the new standard of care in the maternal health care industry," he said.
Conward has spent the last few years as the CTO of SelfArray, a startup founded by Clint Ballinger, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from RPI and decided to work at SelfArray instead of taking a job offer at Boeing.
There are 11 people working on the startup, including software developers. It has a long list of advisers, including experts who have worked for IBM Watson Health and the New York State Department of Health.
The startup is raising a seed round of $2.5 million and has won a couple of startup awards, including one from Cornell Tech for creating “positive societal impact” and $50,000 from the new Shovel Ready fund through Innovate 518.
