08.16.23
Mission Critical
By Tammy Davis, Living Northeast Indiana, August-October 2023
Not long ago, Ariana McGee walked away from her senior position at a large medical device company to devote herself to her passion project. Her mission is simple: Save moms and babies.
McGee’s new venture, Navigate Maternity, will allow medical providers to remotely monitor key physical and psychological metrics through a patient’s pregnancy and up to one year postpartum. In particular, the period between childbirth and the mother’s first postnatal appointment is critical, yet often ignored.
“That’s 42 days without being touched,” explains McGee. “If something goes wrong, no one would know.”
The data overwhelmingly supports a need for this type of care. The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-resource nation, while Indiana ranks third in the country. Additionally, Black women are impacted three to four times more than white women. What disturbs McGee most, however, is that although 84% of these deaths are preventable, the death rate has more than doubled since 1986.
“That means it was safer for my mother to have me in 1990 than it was for me to have my daughter,” says McGee.
