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On Thursday, Aegis Ventures launched a new startup with Northwell Holdings, the enterprise capital arm of Northwell Health. The New York Metropolis-based firm, named Upliv, focuses on digital menopause care.
In April, Aegis stated it would invest at the very least $100 million in seed-stage funds towards the launch and growth of joint ventures with Northwell Well being. The companions challenge that Upliv’s seed funding by the top of 2023 will probably be $8.4 million.
Aegis and Northwell Holdings created Upliv to higher serve the estimated 1 million U.S. ladies who expertise menopause every year, stated Allison Schoeneck, the startup’s CEO, in a latest interview.
When ladies undergo menopause, they expertise complicated adjustments to a number of techniques within the physique. Although ladies expertise reasonable to debilitating signs throughout a spread of areas — equivalent to scorching flashes, evening sweats, sexual dysfunction, melancholy, insomnia and muscle aches — these signs aren’t talked about a lot inside the medical group, in response to Schoeneck. She added that many ladies really feel left to navigate this part of life alone.
“Happily, loads of ladies do go to their main care doctor or their OB/GYN to hunt remedy, however most clinicians really don’t have any particular menopause coaching or experience,” Schoeneck stated. “In truth, solely about 20% of OB/GYN packages present any sort of menopause coaching. And as a lot as 75% of girls obtain no remedy in any respect. This implies ladies are needlessly struggling, they usually’re not supported within the ways in which they ideally want. We created Upliv to alter that paradigm.”
The startup will companion with employers to offer digital care companies to their workers with perimenopause and menopause signs. On Upliv’s platform, ladies can entry academic assets, prescriptions, reside digital occasions to attach with different sufferers, and video consultations with clinicians and well being coaches who’re educated in menopause care. The care that the startup gives is predicated on pointers from the North American Menopause Society.
Initially, Upliv’s companies will probably be out there to Northwell workers. The well being system, which is the most important in New York state, surveyed 900 of its workers and located that almost all of respondents expertise reasonable to extreme menopause signs, together with scorching flashes, weight acquire, sleep points, and fatigue.
To handle this, Northwell is starting a pilot program with a choose variety of nurses earlier than it rolls out Upliv’s companies system-wide within the first quarter of subsequent yr.
Upliv plans to roll out its companies to extra employers in mid-2023, in response to Schoeneck. The startup’s program will probably be provided as a profit at zero price to workers, she stated.
Dr. Stacey Rosen, senior vp of Northwell’s Katz Institute for Women’s Health, instructed MedCity Information she hopes that extra employers add Upliv’s program as a profit over the approaching years.
“Offering this profit actually displays an organization’s respect for girls,” Dr. Rosen stated. “And the platform is absolutely fairly multi-pronged, with regard to time with medical suppliers and the large quantity of schooling and assist in areas that conventional healthcare supply doesn’t give attention to — like sleep, behavioral well being points and diet.”
As for competitors, Upliv isn’t the one menopause-focused startup on the market. Others embody Vira Health and Evernow. Upliv differentiates itself with its give attention to going after the employer market and making its companies out there to ladies for free of charge, Schoeneck argued. She additionally identified that Upliv’s partnership with Northwell makes it distinctive.
“We’re capable of join sufferers, when vital, to the proper supplier by our integration with Northwell,” Schoeneck stated. “So reasonably than us simply working in a silo, we’re actually capable of join ladies to the various varieties of assets and care that she may have.”
Photograph: Toa55, Getty Photos
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