Leah Sparks’ Post

It feels like a lifetime ago since we went from working mostly in office to mostly at home. There is a lot I like about remote work - the balance with life demands, the ability to recruit talent more broadly, the way we’ve harnessed technology to make us productive in a remote world. However, this evening I was reminded of how much joy comes from in-person time with treasured colleagues - the hearty laughs, the honest conversations, and lots and lots of hugs. A happy hour with the subset of the Wildflower team still within driving distance of SF helped me remember that while we certainly carry deep inspiration to help our patients and our healthcare partners, we also are inspired by each other and our shared commitments. Thank you Team Wildflower both near and far!

Thank you to Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati for hosting their annual Medical Device and Digital Health Conference and inviting me to be part of the panel on CEO leadership. Special shout out to the features on “health for women” during Day 1 of the conference. A panel led by Margaret Melville was especially impactful at describing how the industry is moving beyond “women’s health” to redefining the overall system to fully meet the needs of women across a range of conditions - which is real cause for hope! Thank you Andrea Linna and Megan Baier for hosting!

Another great piece from Laurie Zephyrin and her team at Commonwealth highlighting the opportunity for community based OB care models including birth centers to improve access and reduce race-based disparities in maternal health. This lays out the economic challenges that these groups often confront due to reimbursement challenges. We have to figure out how to bring midwife-led care and birth centers into value-based networks so these groups are rewarded for the quality and cost effectiveness they can bring, and so that the models are sustainable and scalable. https://lnkd.in/gKWM2eYZ

Sometimes when you meet people, it just clicks. That happens with companies too, and that's how our partnership with ProgenyHealth, LLC has felt ever since we began working alongside this passionate, visionary team to figure out at 1+1 = 3 partnership model. We realized that Wildflower is really good at technology and non-clinical services, and Progeny is world-class at clinical and care management across maternity and NICU care. Together, we offer a complete and compelling value proposition to joint clients, and I'm thrilled to officially be in market together offering a combined solution to payer partners. Huge thanks to Ellen Stang who I met so many years ago and bonded over our shared passion for improving maternal-newborn health, and to Susan Torroella who has given the combined teams room to run at big ideas and opportunities together. We are thrilled to be aligned on our efforts to transform care during pregnancy, postpartum, NICU care and beyond. https://lnkd.in/gG-7_zA7

This great reporting by Time magazine illuminates the problems we have with progress in maternal health access and outcomes, and why so much of it comes back to money. The reality is that the US healthcare system is driven by economics, and until we make care transformation for maternity sustainable financially, we are unlikely to turn the tide on the unacceptable rates of bad outcomes. The easy takeaway from this article is that maternity care needs to be better reimbursed, and not just for traditional sites of care, but also for midwife-led care, doulas, remote monitoring, community health workers, and more. On the flip side, health insurers can only sustainably increase fee schedules if it results in better quality, outcomes, lower race-based disparities, and lower overall costs. This is the promise of value-based care in a nutshell. Let's make the investments to transform the care model (including in some cases more sensible reimbursement), let's measure the impact on quality, outcomes and total cost of care, and let's create a better, safer healthcare system for pregnant people and their families. https://lnkd.in/gVJ2b2aM

You may have heard that we are in the middle of Black Maternal Health Week (April 11 - 17). While I appreciate having a designated week of the year to highlight the disparities in maternal care & outcomes for Black patients, this is obviously a devastating problem that we think about every day of the year at Wildflower Health, as do so many of you in our broader community of providers, innovators and thought leaders in maternal health. No one yet has the answers on how to eliminate the health inequities that Black pregnant people face, and particularly during this week of the year, I encourage our community to share what we've learned and what we are are doing to combat this injustice in our system. I've linked here to the approach we are taking at Wildflower, which primarily lies in deploying more services and support to patients who we know are more likely to face bias or challenges as they navigate healthcare. What are others doing? Where can we learn from each other? #maternity #maternalhealth #healthcare #maternalhealthequity #blackmaternalhealth #blackmaternalhealthweek #bmhw24 #healthequity https://lnkd.in/gyJNGW4h

I love this simple but powerful perspective that we sometimes forget in healthcare - be kind to patients, especially those who may feel shame like the example here of pregnant patients with SUD. We see this every day at Wildflower in case studies where patients open up to our health advocates because our amazing team members led by David Van Der Wal treat people with empathy, respect, and kindness. While taking the time to treat people this way may seem obvious and may not be a clinical breakthrough, it’s often missing in our overburdened system, and it’s a crucial ingredient on the journey to transform healthcare.

Smart people on my team penned this post, not me! But the observations are spot-on in that I fear we have entered an era of skepticism by OB providers who have tried "VBC" and had it not pan out due to an economic design that doesn't aptly reward them or, more often, a contract structure that doesn't include investment in care transformation. I stand by my belief that value-based care in maternity is crucial to reversing the trajectory of poor outcomes and high costs, but it has to be a next-generation model that is thoughtful in both the economic design and the care transformation strategies.

Wow, what a privilege to be with this group of women innovators at the BCBS Tennessee Innovation Day in Chattanooga yesterday. Thank you Echo Health Ventures for making it happen. Here you have companies delivering unmet needs and addressing health inequities across a lifetime of care for women. We encouraged our amazing hosts at BCBS TN to use what they've learned as a springboard for holistic, integrated strategies to better serve the 50% of their membership that have higher claims costs than their male counterparts and who make most of the healthcare decisions for families. Innovating in one segment of women's health or working with one company is not enough. We need to think about women's health as an ecosystem that must be connected together to reverse the unacceptable trends in outcomes disparity, lack of care access, increasing mortality rates, and growing costs...across nearly every category of women's health. Thank you Jessica Zeaske, Annie Weissbach and Neda Long for bringing us together and complete awe for Jana M. Goldberg, MD, FACC, Kathleen Jordan, MD, Caitlyn Donovan, Kate Condliffe, Chanille Witham and my amazing co-panelist Ashlee Wisdom, MPH. You each inspire me. Let's find more ways to collaborate and connect the dots to maximize our impact for the healthcare system! Midi Health Equip Diana Health (We're Hiring!) Heartbeat Health Health In Her HUE

Spent a lively afternoon talking about women’s health with my friend Joanna Strober at a convening assembled by Oliver Wyman. Over the course of the afternoon, I think it became apparent what’s needed to transform women’s health from a care ecosystem perspective. We need a lifetime of care model tuned to women inclusive of both the issues that uniquely impact women but also the gender-agnostic conditions that show up differently for women. We need to extend beyond strictly clinical definitions of health to address the whole person, keeping in mind the caregiving and parenting stressors that more often burden women. We need a ladder of professionals from the non-clinical navigator to the NP to the MD, accessible via multiple channels, all well versed in the unique care dynamics that women face. The question that we couldn’t get past this afternoon was not the what but the how, and specifically how this type of vision for women’s care gets funded or invested in, given reimbursement realities and the economics of our healthcare system. While I think we have found that path at Wildflower solely in pregnancy (where value based care can be applied rather easily), I think it’s a much bigger challenge for broader women’s care. But it’s a challenge worth solving and fighting for.