Jade Kearney is the Co-Founder and CEO of She Matters, a digital health platform designed to improve postpartum comorbidities for Black women through community, culturally competent healthcare providers, and culturally relevant resources.
Victoria and Will talk to Jade about why postpartum depression is so dangerous for women, her experience as a mother and why she founded She Matters, and what culturally competent care looks like for Black women.
SHEMATTERS (https://www.shematters.health/)
Follow SHEMATTERS on Twitter (https://twitter.com/storyfile), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/shematters.io/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/shematters.io/), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/she-matters-inc/about/), or YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3_drWpk9DaXakn5d1jHjIg).
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Transcript:
WILL: This is the Giant Robot Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry.
VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Jade Kearney, the Co-Founder, and CEO of She Matters, a digital health platform designed to improve postpartum comorbidities for Black women through community, culturally competent healthcare providers, and culturally relevant resources.
WILL: Jade, thank you for joining us.
JADE: Thank you for having me.
WILL: So I want to start off the podcast and really talk about the issues that you're working to solve because, to be honest, before I was a dad, I had no idea about any of the things that you're trying to solve, but now that I am a dad, I am very well aware of it. So, can you explain to our audience exactly what you're working to solve?
JADE: No problem. What we're working to solve is we're trying to decrease the incidence of Black maternal morbidity and what that means is how Black women are treated in the delivery room and postpartum. I'm not sure if anybody is aware, so I always try to give the statistics upfront: Black women are four times more likely to die during pregnancy and after pregnancy than White counterparts. And here in the state of New York, we're 12 times more likely to die.
So what we're doing as a company is we're looking to decrease postpartum comorbidities through culturally relevant resources, community, and culturally competent healthcare providers that we supply through our She Matters app.
WILL: Those stats are so devastating to hear. You hear the stats and postpartum and things like that. Why is postpartum so dangerous?
JADE: Postpartum is dangerous because postpartum starts the moment you have a child. And when you first have a child as any type of woman, Black, White, Asian, your focus is on the child, and you're not paying attention to the signs of your body. Also, postpartum is not talked about that much. After you have a baby, the focus is on the baby, and a lot of women don't understand what they're experiencing when they're experiencing it. So there may be some very, very alarming signs that are happening that are going off in your body or mind because we're talking about mental health and physical health that a woman doesn't resonate with because no one's talked to her about it. So there's no information.
So a woman is experiencing...has an out-of-body experience having postpartum anxiety and depression and doesn't know what's going on because there's been no information given about it. It can be a silent killer, really, when you think about eclampsia, and you think about HELLP syndrome, which is like high blood pressure during and postpartum. These are the top killers of all women. And if you don't know the signs of that, if you don't know what to look for, you may very well think it's a part of