This digital health startup seeks to prevent pregnancy complications

belly of pregnant woman and hand of doctor with a stethoscope

The men who cofounded Babyscripts want to demystify and prevent pregnancy complications through data. Their demographic profile — young bachelors with no healthcare background — doesn’t fit what some might expect from a maternity-focused digital health company. However, their reasons for forming the remote patient monitoring business are partly personal.

Juan Pablo Segura, Babyscripts president and cofounder, comes from a tight-knit and deeply Catholic family. As the second oldest of six, he remembers the painful emotions that surfaced after his mother suffered multiple miscarriages.

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“I still remember to this day, kind of a sense of confusion and loss,” Segura said in a phone interview. “Nobody really understood what happened.”

The grief and unanswered questions fueled an urge to help prevent others from enduring similar losses. Working closely with obstetricians from George Washington University School of Medicine, Segura and co-founder Anish Sebastian, former consultants at Deloitte, developed Babyscripts to wirelessly transmit pregnant women’s weight and blood pressure readings to their OBGYNs between visits. Babyscripts’ algorithms detect abnormal readings and when they do, the app notifies the provider and the patient that they should schedule a visit.

Babyscripts navigates a bit differently in the sea of pregnancy apps, which allow women to track milestones but do not wirelessly share the data with their providers. For example, patients can use the Ovia Health app to notify their OBGYNs of changes they’re tracking. Due Date Plus offers a 24/7 nurse line, and Text4Baby regularly sends pregnancy information to expectant women.

Also setting Babyscripts off from the rest is that it markets to physicians rather than patients, targeting those who accept lump-sum “global” insurance coverage of $2,500 to $4,000 to cover an entire pregnancy. The connected devices and app allow women to skip some prenatal appointments, saving them time and hassle while lowering the practice’s costs.

“We’re the only company in this space that’s delivering clinical technology tools,” Segura said. “We’re deeply integrated into the provider workflow.”

Babyscripts started attracting attention and investments early in its three-year history. Sebastian was named one of the precision medicine Champions of Change by President Barack Obama in 2015. In December last year, Babyscripts partnered with the Florida Hospital Innovation Lab to host the Future of Obstetrics Summit in Orlando to discuss the roles of precision medicine and technology in pregnancy.

Last month, Florida Hospital’s Alliance and Innovation eXchange announced that Babyscripts and the eXchange would launch a program to help track high-risk pregnancies and mothers’ postpartum health. With Milwaukee-based Aurora Health, the company launched an AI-based text-messaging care plan for pregnant Medicaid recipients. To date, Babyscripts has raised $3 million and will soon close another fundraise, Segura noted.

Babyscripts is working with 10 health systems and plans to add six more in the next month, Segura added. The company is also contemplating a move into pediatrics to remotely track children’s health, according to Segura. He and Sebastian see many opportunities ahead for their brand of connected care.

“A lot of our health systems are deploying these devices as kind of a satisfaction tool and trying to understand how to do population health with having devices in the home already,” Segura said.

What does his mom think?

“She loves it,” Segura said “She goes, ‘Juan Pablo, I hope some day you’ll get married and have kids.’”