Credit:
The United States has the highest rates of maternal mortality in the industrialized world—hard to believe, but tragically true.
“Women are twice as likely to die from complications of pregnancy or childbirth in the U.S. than in Canada or the United Kingdom,” explains the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. “For women of color, especially, the risk is infuriatingly, heartbreakingly, unforgivably high.”
Mohamed Kamara’s story is just one tragic example of a real family rocked by the maternal mortality crisis. In May 2017 having lost both his sister (in Sierra Leone) and aunt (in Columbus, Ohio) to preventable pregnancy related causes (pregnancy hemorrhage and preeclampsia), Mohamed Kamara’s grief fueled a determination to confront the maternal mortality crisis head on.
Up to that point Kamara had been quite successful in the world of finance, but he decided to make a stark professional pivot. “I was a 30-year-old working as a senior financial analyst in a tax and M&A group,” he explains in an email interview. “I immediately felt I needed to be in healthcare whether that is health IT or finance in order to learn and journey into fixing the maternal health gap for women of color.” Kamara then assumed a CFO role with a behavior healthcare clinic in in Washington D.C. and volunteered with Project Hope to support women in the Dominican Republic. Those experiences taught him a lot about the root causes of maternal care disparities, and he soon determined that a sophisticated, culturally sensitive telehealth platform could prove to be a game-changer. “I began the process of UI/UX design and creating a prototype via Visio and Figma to write the first line of codes for the web version then hired software back-end developers to build out the rest of the patient and physician mobile apps on iOS and Android.”
After his sister’s unexpected death in 2017, Kamara was expected to help care for her three children—Fatmata, Mohamed Jr., and Mamusu. He could have played it safe by staying in corporate finance, but he chose a different path.
In April 2020 InovCares was launched.
Kamarah's sister's children Fatmata, Mohamed Jr., and Mamusu Kamara.
The Gravity of the Maternal Health Crisis
Many don’t realize that while the United States spends more money per capita on maternal and child health than any country worldwide, it is the only high-resource nation with a steadily increasing maternal mortality and fetal death rate with notable disparities by race and ethnicity. “Pregnancy-related deaths among American women have risen markedly over the past 30 years, despite an overall downward trend worldwide. Many of these deaths are preventable, and the risk remains three to four times higher for Black women than white women at all levels of income or education,” notes this PEW Charitable Trust article. Tragically, a whopping 60% of the maternal mortality deaths are actually preventable. Enumerating the factors contributing to maternal mortality deaths, the article cites quality of medical care, gaps in post-birth support and access to care, transportation, housing, education, and other social determinants of health.
Emphasizing the importance of access to maternity care resources, the March of Dimes’ 2022 report “Nowhere to Go: Maternity Care Deserts Across the U.S.” concludes that “areas where there is low or no access affect up to 6.9 million women and almost 500,000 births across the U.S,” a 5% increase in counties that have less maternity access since 2020. Among the report’s policy recommendations to Congress and state governments is a request to expand telehealth services to “bridge gaps in health care, especially obstetric services where none exist and costs are considerable.”
The InovCares Platform Design
Recognizing that maternal mortality is so much more than a healthcare problem, Kamara incorproated a decidedly intersectional approach into the platform’s design. “InovCares is a digital virtual care platform striving to address the maternal health crisis with collaborative and comprehensive mobile apps that emphasize patient education, connection to culturally-sensitive doctors and other clinical team members, as well as virtual assessment for remote patient monitoring with an incentive rewards program for adopting healthy behaviors,” explains Kamara. “InovCares is a digital health marketplace that leverages HIPAA-compliant NASA-patented technology and artificial intelligence cinematography to deliver personalized primary and specialized care services including point-of-care testing at low-cost. Our low-cost pricing strategy is sustained through provider subscription fees, grants, and permits free services such as transportation and prescription delivery.”
The platform includes a two-sided network providing patient and provider-facing applications to support access and improve outcomes. Subscribed providers are required to complete an intensive training course facilitated by Medscape on concepts of health equity, with specific emphasis on cultural competency and implicit bias. The technology scales patient interaction for seamless tracking and assessment of vital functions in real-time which allows deviations to be identified and monitored.
The platform is designed to minimize common barriers faced by pregnant and post partum women by reducing costs, wait times and transportation needs, improving patient access to essential testing and prescriptions, providing a range of culturally competent specialists, and empowering and educating patients through easy access to online content. Similarly, InovCares seeks to alleviate common factors that drive provider burnout. “Our platform eliminates visit time restraints and improves patient follow-up, all the while imposing fewer administrative hurdles, offering improved flexibility and a simple, reliable reimbursement strategy,” Kamara says. “Readily available biometrics and point of care testing also maximizes effective patient monitoring, thereby facilitating medical decision-making.”
Telemedicine as an Effective Tool
While the ob/gyn specialty has traditionally been reliant on in-person interaction, the InovCares platform has gone to great lengths to both maximize the technology’s effectiveness while integrating it into a broader holistic approach. “To guide each patient toward a healthier future, InovCares uses smartphone cameras and integrated NASA technology to turn cinematography into a full 3D model of the patient,” Kamara explains. “That model generates a unique health risk report. This custom holistic report helps patients to track key risks & chronic conditions while guiding patients to make healthy lifestyle changes before small warning signs become catastrophic health risks.”
Hansa Bhargava, MD, chief Medical Officer, Medscape Education has advised InovCares’ leadership. Referencing high quality maternal health care, she explains, "There are many populations that may not have this access due to rural geography, economics or social inequities. Telemedicine can help to bridge those gaps.”
InovCares provider and President GP Health Ahmad Garrett-Price, M.D. insists that telemedicine can also facilitate timely follow up and provide critically important care nudges. “Care nudges provide additional insight to the clinical care team. They can allow for a more timely escalation of care and other resources, thus allowing for a more proactive approach to care which is needed to achieve better clinical outcomes,” says Garrett-Price.
InovCares Chief Medical Officer and board-certified gynecologist, Dr. Ruth O. Arumala insists that telemedicine can be particularly effective in managing many health conditions relevant for pregnant patients including gestational diabetes, hypertension, birth control and menopause among others. “An additional bonus is physicians of different specialties can conference with the patient at the same time,” she explains. “For instance, endometriosis tends to be concomitant with irritable bowel syndrome and/or interstitial cystitis. A patient with all three can meet with a gynecologist, gastroenterologist and urologist at the same time allowing for coordinated care.”
InovCares also works in tandem with federally qualified health centers and private practices for in-person delivery, prenatal, and postpartum visits. “The follow-up visits and mothers have cultivated their community through our health tribe where they create within the app different support groups for mental and physical health, especially since some of our mothers experience postpartum depression,” Kamara adds.
Just a few years ago Mohamed Kamara—with no formal healthcare background—pivoted from a comfortable, successful career in finance to follow a passion motivated by personal tragedy. In less than three years InovCares has provided more than 10,000 virtual consultations and attracted some impressive supporters. Google selected InovCares to not only participate in the Google for Startup Founder Academy but also to tell their story on Google Play, To date InovCares has received $500,000 in venture and non-dilutive capital, and they’re currently fundraising for a $1.5M pre-seed round. Mohamed Kamara’s mission is clear, and he’s just getting started.
