Apple highlights Poppy Seed Health’s fight for maternal health equity

Apple is highlighting one developer’s mission to end maternal health inequity.

In a new post on Apple’s Newsroom, the company is putting a spotlight on Poppy Seed Health and Simmone Taitt, its founder and CEO. The app, which is an “on-demand health advocacy app for birthing people providing pregnancy and postpartum care,” is attempting to bring critical healthcare information to all.

After struggling to find medical, emotional, and mental health support during her first trimester, Taitt began to build the service herself.

Launched exclusively on the App Store in April 2021, and recently featured as an App of the Day, Poppy Seed Health provides 24/7 access to a diverse network of doulas, midwives, and nurses for birthing, postpartum, and pregnancy and infant loss support. To ensure users are paired with an appropriate advocate for their particular needs, Poppy has introduced matching algorithms for where a user is in their journey, from pregnancy to postpartum. Soon, the app will match users with care providers based on preferences such as race, ethnicity, languages spoken, and LGBTQIA+ identification.

Not only does that app serve a diverse group of people looking for support, but those who struggle to pay the membership fee can also get the service for free.

Poppy Seed Health’s emphasis on diversity is intentional. It builds a layer of accessibility into the app that Taitt and her team decided early on would be its core offering: assisting birthing people who need emotional, mental, and well-being support wherever they are in their journey. It was vital to Taitt that Poppy be priced in a way that is affordable for all users, and so for each member paying the $29 monthly subscription price, the app is able to provide free access to one user who is receiving Medicaid. Today, 30 percent of the people who use Poppy Seed Health are on Medicaid, and 75 percent of users visit the app’s free evidence-based library.

Taitt said that her experience building the service showed the “entire ecosystem coming together to make technology accessible.”

“I went from getting bit by the startup bug and loving technology, to truly building it myself. And understanding that technology is so much bigger than just the people who are actually building it. It’s the entire ecosystem coming together to make technology accessible.”

You can read the entire feature on the Apple Newsroom website. (You can also download Poppy Seed Health on the App Store now.