The goal of Poppy Seed Health is to connect underserved pregnant women to nurses, midwives and doulas who can offer on-demand assistance.This article is part of Upstart, a series about companies harnessing new science and technology to solve challenges in their industries.Simmone Taitt had a romanticized notion of her journey to motherhood — ups and downs, sure, but an overall beautiful experience. Then she had a miscarriage. What happened next changed the way she thought about compassionate health care, and inspired her to found a start-up, Poppy Seed Health, that aimed to support women the way she wished she had been supported.According to Ms. Taitt, during a prenatal appointment the doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat. She “looked at me and said that my body had terminated the pregnancy, which was a dagger to the heart,” she said. “‘It’s normal and happens all the time,’” Mrs. Taitt recalls the doctor saying. “‘I will see you in a few months when you start trying again’ — and she left the room.”That was the extent of the support Ms. Taitt received. “I gathered my things,” she said. “I was crying. I was devastated, and that was the most emotionally insensitive and shocking thing for me to hear.”That would not be Ms. Taitt’s only miscarriage, and the pattern that emerged would propel her to take action: She didn’t want another pregnant person to endure the highs and lows of pregnancy and not feel supported. And so she founded Poppy Seed, which offers an app that connects pregnant women to on-demand support from nurses, midwives and doulas. These providers don’t offer medical advice, as Poppy Seed’s website notes, but Ms. Taitt believes their timely counseling offers a host of other benefits.The company, based in New York City, now has about two dozen employees. The app has 400 users who collectively have logged about 50,000 hours of use, according to Ms. Taitt. Simmone Taitt, chief executive of Poppy Seed Health.Brian Fraser for The New York TimesMs. Taitt, 40, hopes Poppy Seed will be a solution to “maternal health deserts.” According to a March of Dimes report, 2.2 million women of childbearing age live in parts of the United States that have no hospitals offering obstetric care, no birth centers and no obstetric providers. Without access to these services, women have a harder time scheduling appointments for prenatal and postpartum care, and may be more likely to experience serious complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Telehealth can help fill these gaps in care.Even women who don’t live in maternity care deserts can benefit from an expert sounding board. Janell Hickman-Kirby, 36, turned to the Poppy Seed app‌ for reassurance ‌‌after a pregnancy loss and again after the birth of her baby. She‌‌ said she found that many parts of pregnancy ‌weren’t common sense, and ‌that maternity care functions differently from other types of medicine. A first time mother might not know when to schedule appointments or what to anticipate during pregnancy, for example. Maternity care often involves more testing and screenings than an average visit to your primary care doctor. Also, doulas can have a different approach in how they communicate with clients from OB-GYNs, something Ms. Hickman-Kirby learned through the Poppy Seed app.Loved ones may offer their support during a pregnancy, Ms. Hickman-Kirby said, but that doesn’t prevent someone from engaging in “panic-inducing” doomscrolling on Google. She also noted that while most appointments with OB-GYNs are time-limited, appointments on the app are not.“It’s nice to ask questions, especially when you’re in the beginning stages of your pregnancy,” she said. “Should I be feeling this tired, or is this normal? When should I make a doctor’s appointment?”Ms. Hickman-Kirby, who is Black, said she shares the trepidation that many Black women feel around pregnancy services: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women are three times more likely than white women to die during childbirth. Many of these deaths — affected by factors including underlying health conditions, lack of access to quality care and biases in the health care system — are preventable. Ms. Hickman-Kirby said Poppy Seed Health filled in some of the gaps in her maternity care.Referring to her primary OB-GYN, Ms. Hickman-Kirby said: “For my first appointment, I felt really rushed, and she had poor bedside manner and didn’t really explain a lot to me. As a first-time parent, I didn’t realize that if you had a medical emergency, you could call the doctor’s office and they connect you with an OB-GYN.”After losing her first pregnancy, Ms. Hickman-Kirby turned to Poppy Seed, which connected her to doulas who gave her various options for post-miscarriage treatment. She also learned that a woman who has a miscarriage can experience postpartum depression.In the Poppy Seed Health app, users can look up information on pre- and postnatal care.AppleAnne Schuchman, who has been a doula for 10 years, sees Poppy Seed as an extension of her practice. She takes on additional cases through the platform, which, she says, gives her the opportunity to be someone’s support when they need it most.The app functions a bit like a ride-hailing app, with users matched to an available doula or midwife in real time.“I might get that chat at 11:30 at night with someone who has had a miscarriage,” Ms. Schuchman said. “They may even have a supportive partner and a provider is giving them medical support, but an important part of being a doula is that we offer emotional support while being detached, in a healthy way.”Poppy Seed can also extend the reach of doulas like Ms. Schuchman. “I’ve gotten some Poppy chats from people preconception to people with 1-year-olds who are maybe still breastfeeding or thinking about getting pregnant again and have questions about that,” she said.In certain states, doula costs are at least partly covered by Medicaid, but they can run from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, and reimbursement rates can be low. Poppy Seed offers a monthly $29 per month flat rate for unlimited conversations over text messaging, or $5 for a 30-minute phone chat. Members can search in the app for information on all stages of pregnancy and early postnatal care.But the app isn’t right for everyone or every pregnancy situation. For starters, it requires access to a smartphone and a credit card. And practitioners on the app are not substitutes for doctors. Some pregnancy issues warrant an in-person visit, where procedures like an ultrasound or a pelvic exam can be conducted. And while a half-hour counseling session might cost less than an insurance co-pay, it shouldn’t replace a checkup with a medical professional.Maria Tucker Murray, an OB-GYN at Total Women’s Health in Pottstown, Pa., voiced some concerns about relying on doulas for pregnancy care. “I do support the use of doulas. They can reduce anxiety,” she said. “As far as 24/7 access, I’m not sure how comfortable I would be. They may want to intervene in medical management. Problems arise when some doulas want to intervene in medical management or overstep their boundaries with practitioners.”Though the company doesn’t release numbers regarding the income levels of their customers, Ms. Taitt said the ability to reach a broader group is a strong motivation for her.“I think the best things that we can put out in the world are based on our lived experiences, and finding solutions for those things or creating them for ourselves can be very powerful for us,” she said. “Selfishly, Poppy Seed Health is for me, but it is for the millions of people that need it that are going through very similar journeys as I went through and am still currently going through.”

Visionaries is a limited series that looks at figures who are trying to transform the way we live.Dr. Rachel Hardeman’s journey to understanding community health care began in Cuba, where she studied medicine and public health at the Latin American School of Medicine from 2002 to 2004. “That’s really where I learned not just what public health was, but how powerful it could be,” she said. “I saw that there’s a different model for caring for people than what we know and what I’d been exposed to in the United States.”In February 2021, Dr. Hardeman, who is now a reproductive health equity researcher and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, founded the Center for Anti-Racism Research for Health Equity, which seeks health care solutions to the effects of policies and attitudes that work against people of color. Dr. Hardeman is the first to acknowledge that balancing her academic work and the center can be a challenge. “I feel like I’m building a plane while also flying the plane,” she said. “The work can’t stop while I build the infrastructure for the center.”While the subjects and data-driven results of her research — survival rates of Black infants who are cared for by Black doctors versus white doctors after difficult deliveries, for example — sometimes garner controversy, Dr. Hardeman believes they are necessary for understanding the Black experience in the United States.She has also partnered with the Roots Community Birth Center in Minneapolis, one of the first Black birthing centers in the United States. Her work has shown the difference that Roots and similar centers can make for both mothers and their babies, revealing more positive outcomes than many hospital systems.Government involvement, Dr. Hardeman said, is also key. While she tries to get congressional support, she is leading up a work group with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, where “we are tasked with developing a tool to help maternal mortality review committees identify racism as a contributing factor in maternal deaths,” she said.Dr. Hardeman hopes to inspire others to think bigger about policies that hamstring women of color, and in turn, to think of solutions that protect mothers and babies: “We have to be thinking about the complexities of how this all shows up right to be able to have the impact.” (The following interview has been condensed and edited.)When and how did you determine where you wanted to focus?At Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black college in New Orleans. I was actually on the pre-med path. I talked a lot about health disparities, but I didn’t have the language for what I was seeing, right within my family and my community and certainly in New Orleans. Xavier is surrounded by some really poor and underresourced neighborhoods and a lot of marginalized folks, and so I knew — even in undergrad I knew — that I was really interested in asking: How do we change this reality?And your path to that was through academia?I went into my Ph.D. program with the intention of getting the training I needed to go work for a policy institute to use evidence to inform policy. And somewhere along the way, I started looking around at who I learned from and who taught me as a doctoral student, who was saying the words that I wanted and needed to hear about racial inequities and health and who wasn’t.What did you learn from that assessment?I realized that as a doctoral student or in the School of Public Health that I’d never taken a class from someone who was Black. So I thought to myself, “If not me, then who?” What could my place be in academia? What would that look like? Can I occupy space in academia and still be true to who I am?And it seems that you’ve found quite a few roles that accomplish that. Do you feel as if you have to do it all?I feel like you have to be working at multiple places along the spectrum to actually get the work done. It’s all related, and I’m a big thinker. I like to think big and bold and broadly about this work and the ways that it can be connected. So everything I do is very intentional. I deeply feel the urgency. It’s a matter of life and death.Do you have any free time?[Laughs] I don’t. Work has been really interesting and important because we’ve sounded the alarm on the impact of racism on maternal health outcomes. Now we’re trying to sort of see how we collect these data and identify what’s happening and these maternal deaths, so both of the maternal deaths — mother and child — aren’t in vain. Also, statistically, we need to be able to, either from a quantitative or a research perspective, name what’s happening, and also map out how we intervene.Does your identity as a Black woman play into your feeling as if you need to do everything in this space?You’re familiar with the narrative of Black women taking on the caregiver role. My daughter and I both have shirts that say “Black girls save the world.” I think that phenomenon is hard to move away from, especially when I think about the Black role models that came before me who did incredible things: my mom and both my grandmothers, who were just incredible people who cared for their families and their communities and did what they could to affect change in the spaces that they were in. I come from a family where it was very clear to me from a young age that to whom much is given, much is required. I’ve always had this sense of responsibility, in addition to just caring deeply about people — my people — and caring deeply about liberation.With all of that in mind, how do you care for yourself to prevent burnout?In the past couple of years, I’ve become more intentional about self-care. I found an amazing Black female therapist who helps me a great deal. I intentionally take time off to go away with my family. Recently, my husband and I booked airfare and we went someplace warm for a few days to relax and get some vitamin D, some sunshine. I’m also trying to shift my thinking. I can’t show up if I’m not taking care of myself.I think it was [the sociologist and New York Times contributing opinion writer] Tressie McMillan Cottom who said: “These institutions do not love you or they will not love you back. They’re still there to generate knowledge and generate capital, and you have to recognize that you are someone who’s helping to make that happen. But you don’t owe them anything.” This is advice I need to take personally. We’re all replaceable.What would you tell another Black woman who’s maybe starting out in her career and feels like she needs to do it all?I always want to encourage them to be clear about why they’re there and what they want to do. They also have to make sure that’s what’s driving them. I always say my purpose in being here is to manifest racial justice so that Black women and girls can live their full greatness and glory that they can achieve and have the opportunities for health equity. I think you have to know that and be clear about that to be able to be in the space of spaces that I am in and thrive.