Everyday Health, Wildflower Health partner to improve health outcomes in pregnant women

Everyday Health, Inc. (NYSE: EVDY), a leading digital health and wellness company, today announced a strategic partnership with Wildflower Health. Through this partnership, Everyday Health expands its suite of offerings to help health plans and employers reach and engage pregnant women earlier in their pregnancies to improve health outcomes and reduce medical costs.

The partnership combines the success of the popular What to Expect digital franchise, which offers pregnant women engaging content, mobile tools and resources to ensure healthier pregnancies with Wildflower Health's Due Date Plus, a smartphone-based maternity program that identifies high-risk pregnancies and drives appropriate actions based on health plan benefits and resources.

"Healthy pregnancies lead to healthy babies," said Heidi Murkoff, creator of What to Expect. "This new collaboration complements our efforts to ensure moms get access to the support and information they need right from the start of their pregnancies."

Increased medical costs resulting from pregnancy complications are a major concern for both parents and health insurers. Approximately 11% of U.S. babies are born prematurely, and these high risk pregnancies can cost up to 20 times more than full-term births, resulting in a $26.2 billion annual cost burden on the U.S. healthcare system. Early detection and support can help reduce the risk and costs resulting from pregnancy complications, but health insurers and employers do not typically learn whether their members or employees are pregnant until the second trimester.

"We are connecting payors and expectant mothers very early in the pregnancy journey to identify women who can benefit from existing programs and resources," said Miki Kapoor, Everyday Health's President of Healthcare Solutions. "This results in healthier pregnancies while substantially reducing costs for everyone."

Everyday Health operates the What to Expect website and mobile applications, which are industry-leading digital resources for pregnant women. In 2014, approximately 75% of pregnant women in the U.S. visited the What to Expect digital platform. About 50% of pregnant women registered to receive personalized content tailored to their pregnancy and on average engage with What to Expect 17 times per month. Importantly, nearly 60% of these registrations occurred before the 10^th week of pregnancy, much sooner than health insurers identify pregnant women via claims data and are able to implement maternity programs.

"Through this innovative partnership, we will provide customers with unparalleled risk identification, engagement and intervention that can meaningfully reduce medical costs," said Leah Sparks, CEO and co-Founder of Wildflower Health. "We are excited to team with Everyday Health to increase our reach to pregnant women and scale this solution into the health plan, employer and Medicaid markets."

The partnership includes Wildflower Health's enterprise mobile application platform that is branded for health plans and built on a HIPAA-compliant architecture for both iOS and Android operating systems.

Everyday Health and Wildflower Health are exhibiting together at America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) Institute 2015 meeting on June 3-5 in Nashville, Tennessee.

SOURCE Everyday Health, Inc.