Revolutionizing Maternal Care: Shaping the Future of Holistic Prenatal Health in 2025
Nic Encina, Co-Founder, Modelo Health
Maternal health and prenatal care continue being areas of concern in US healthcare. We have done a lot to shine a spotlight on the issues, but we’re nowhere close to declaring “problem solved.” Modelo Health researchers have long argued that a key to addressing these issues is to look at mothers-to-be holistically, using principles of Precision Medicine to meet mothers where they are, not where we want them to be. That is, whereas clinical care today tends to look at mothers through a narrow clinical lens, and sometimes with elements of genetics/heredity, we feel strongly that a woman’s health is defined by factors far beyond these two health determinants. After all, our health is really the result of how our nature interacts with our nurture to yield a complex and dynamic system of outcomes. Looking at nature without nurture is at best half the picture, and we are the first platform to draw insights from the other important determinants: socioeconomic, environmental, and behavioral.
It just makes intuitive sense, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t we be better informed about a woman’s overall risk by including her living conditions in her health assessment? After all, the risk profile for a pregnant woman with mild hypoglycemia and otherwise normal medical records would be amplified if we also knew that she had food insecurity, struggled with depression, and lived in a zip code where radioactive isotopes were detected in the drinking water. Without that additional information we’d be looking only for issues with blood glucose, while completely overlooking other issues that might be just as severe. This is what we mean by looking at a woman holistically, assessing her through all of the health determinants and building a complete picture and roadmap to steer away from risk and toward a healthy and happy delivery.
2025 is a big year for Modelo Health. We have been working for years at delivering the 1st preventive care app that monitors across all health determinants, providing an inclusive, multilingual and personalized experience to every mom and her birth team. We are proud to be pushing the boundaries on holistic prenatal care, and in 2025 we are launching new projects that we are elated to announce.
We have recently launched a project at the world renown Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, which is consistently ranked #1 in women’s health! We are honored that the leading women’s health clinicians would be so intrigued by Modelo Health that they would prioritize our project over the thousands of other projects proposed to them monthly!
We are launching an innovative new approach to supporting opioid and other substance-use pregnancies. We are doing so in partnership with the city of Lawrence, Mass., and with direct support by the Office of Mayor Brian DePeña. We know how risky pregnancy can be in the best scenarios, so when we think about pregnancies that are plagued by substance use we need to be extra vigilant. The City of Lawrence is entrusting us to provide these mothers with monitoring and support systems should they need help to get through some of the hardest times. We are humbled to be called to this challenge, and we have accepted that challenge. We stand side-by-side with the innovative people from Lawrence to protect their most vulnerable pregnancies.
Modelo Health has come a long way, and 2025 will be a pivotal year for us. The projects mentioned above, and others, will define our course for the next few years and we feel ready and able to work with leading clinicians in the country to keep mothers and babies healthy. There really is no greater good than to protect the very future of our society.