How the college healthcare market surprised us

In the world of startups, sometimes you find your customers–and sometimes they find you.

When we launched Maven last year, we focused on giving women better and quicker access to top healthcare advice around pregnancy and childbirth. Our first two years of operation have generally validated this hypothesis — but also delivered new, and perhaps more surprising, insights on gaps in the women’s healthcare market.

First among these is the major opportunity to deliver better options to women on college campuses. Within months of launch, Maven started seeing strong organic demand from college women–a group we initially thought would be unlikely to use our product.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised. In fact, college women as well as new and expecting mothers share many similarities: They both confront new and unfamiliar health challenges (for college students, these mostly relate to sexual and mental health); they often have a host of potentially “awkward” questions that cannot be confidently answered via Google or WebMD; they both face an expensive, complicated, and burdensome “system” for in-office care; and they are both generally quite busy and have better things to do with their time than sit in a waiting room.

So sure enough, the appointments started rolling in:

· Appointments with OB/GYNs or nurses about potentially uncomfortable sexual health questions that college women didn’t want to ask their friends

· One-off appointments with college women seeking prescriptions for everything from sinus infections to birth control

· Mental health appointments with students hesitant to seek care through university health services, where they might run into fellow students — or through their parents — or having their parents set them up with a private practitioner, which gets to be very expensive.

· Appointments with students at rural campuses with few on-site healthcare options

· Appointments with students at Jesuit or Catholic colleges that offer limited support for sexual health through “standard” channels

A recurring theme across these appointments was a feeling that students would face less of a stigma, or less judgment, in digital interactions.

The more we looked into college health, the more we realized that the anecdotes we heard from our patients and the thousands of Maven Campus ambassador applicants was also supported by data. According to a 2012 National Alliance on Mental Illness study, many students have to wait more than five days to receive care from on-campus providers, even though 95% of college counseling centers said the number of students with significant psychological problems is a growing concern. Mental health — specifically eating disorders, depression, and anxiety — affect women at roughly twice the rate of men, and mental health issues often rear themselves in college. STIs on campuses abound — according to Stanford University’s Sexual Health Peer Resource Center, 1 in 4 college students have an STI. And, sadly enough, a remarkable percentage of women experience sexual assault on campus.

So we decided to build an entire product to help serve college women more directly: Maven Campus, which we launched today. This subscription service offers students unlimited care — by name, or anonymously — for a monthly subscription fee that is less than the cost of a copay for a single in-office appointment.

With women entering the adult healthcare system for the first time around 18 years old, our goal is to promote healthy habits early — so students can be more proactive about their health going forward in their lives. Students can message directly with doctors and nurse practitioners, or can speak face-to-face through video appointments. They can get prescriptions, as needed, as well as mental health support. In a beta version launched over the summer, students bought Maven Campus monthly and annual subscriptions — and frequently parents bought subscriptions for their daughters to ensure that they get sound health advice in their first extended time “out of the nest.”

Like most new product launches in the start-up world, Maven Campus is an experiment. But it is an experiment about which I’m extraordinarily excited. First, what I’ve seen of the market and the stories and passion from the amazing ambassadors we work with suggests that college women are a uniquely underserved group. But even more importantly, this is also a chance to encourage a future generation to take their health into their own hands — in a way that is very much on their terms– and to show the true potential of digital health to create a better, more seamless healthcare experience for consumers who are willing to innovate.