Introducing Zenith Health
Pregnant women are constantly left guessing whether their medications are safe, if their symptoms and experiences are “normal,” and how to make the best decision for their own and their baby’s health. There’s a massive data gap, as pregnant women have historically been excluded from most clinical trials — trials which form the scientific base to answer these questions (in fact, women weren’t required to be included in any clinical trials until 1993!).
To effectively catch up on the decades we’ve lost in women’s health research, Zenith Health is setting out an audacious goal to build the Pregnancy Evidence Project: the country’s largest and most representative base of evidence for maternal and infant health, to empower pregnant women to have healthier, safer, and better informed pregnancies. In the years ahead, Zenith’s aim is to enlist 1 million women in the Pregnancy Evidence Project to better understand pregnancy health with unprecedented scale — both for patients themselves, and for the researchers, care providers, and biopharma innovators all working in pursuit of these goals.
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Information found online from a basic search can be vast, fragmented, often unmoderated for accuracy or quality, and present conflicting views on the same topic. Despite endless articles, social media posts, podcasts, books, and pregnancy tracker apps, pregnant women still struggle to find clear, evidence-based information, and understand what is actually based on research or data.
While there’s been significant and exciting progress in many areas of medicine and health research over the past few decades, it is shocking to see how little progress we’ve made against answering basic, yet critically important, questions during pregnancy, such as…
- What can I use for morning sickness and nausea that is both safe and effective?
- Is it safe to continue taking my ADHD medication during pregnancy?
- How much caffeine is actually okay to be consuming while pregnant?
- Can I safely take melatonin to help me sleep during pregnancy?
- Is it safer to stop or continue my biologic for IBD while I’m trying to conceive and am pregnant?
Behind these gaps is a stunning lack of scientific research and evidence to inform many pregnancy health-related decisions. Pregnant women are left to try to synthesize and evaluate this “firehose” of information, often at inopportune moments (for example, waking up feeling sick in the middle of the night, and trying to figure out whether or not the medicine they have on hand is okay to take) without immediate or direct access to a care provider.
It’s estimated that 90%+ of pregnant women take at least one medication during their pregnancy, yet fewer than 10% of new drugs approved since 1980 have adequate data to determine safety during pregnancy.
But — there are millions of pregnancies in the US each year, and in each one, pregnant women are making tens or hundreds of personal, micro-decisions on ingredient exposures: whether to take a medication, a supplement, eat a type of food, or even to use a skincare product. The data points likely already exist in the real world; we need to build a better way to capture them and learn from them.
We are building Zenith Health to close these gaps — so that “we don’t have the data” is never the reason for guesswork or the bottleneck to a patient making an informed and empowered choice about their own or their baby’s health.
Pregnancy is an ideal area to begin to actively learn from the data points generated by the millions of women each year making these decisions — women are making their own choices about managing their health, and capturing these real-world data points represents a material improvement in our ability to support questions with real data. We’ve embedded privacy as a core principle in how we collect, manage, and protect data, ensuring it is both treated with the protections it deserves and is also fit to power important research and studies. Our commitment is to build a strong and representative community invested in better data so that we can democratize access to high-quality information for those who need and crave it most: patients.
In achieving our mission, we believe that we’re setting the foundation not just for maternal health research, but for all kinds of patient-driven research and evidence in the future. Many other areas of health and wellness carry similar ambiguities in terms of clear, evidence-based, accessible information with high levels of interest from the public — whether in areas like fitness and exercise science, diet and nutrition, over the counter medicines and supplements, skincare and cosmetics, aging and longevity, and more.
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In the coming weeks, we’ll be announcing our initial product launch — aiming to help pregnant women better qualify pregnancy health-related evidence, and contribute their anonymized experiences to fuel the research needed to improve maternal and infant health outcomes. Sign up at zenithhealth.io to be notified when our product is live! In the meantime, we are always eager to connect with future teammates, partners, and maternal health advocates and enthusiasts; if this is you, please feel free to get in touch with us here.
