• Articles
  • Collections
  • Videos
  • Explore HP

Impact

Watch how one woman is helping Black mothers and babies in The Big Idea: Birth Without Bias

Kimberly Seals Allers founded the Irth App, a platform that empowers Black and Brown parents with crowd-sourced, peer reviews to help combat bias in maternal healthcare.

By Leigh-Ann Jackson — September 7, 2023

Impact

Watch how one woman is helping Black mothers and babies in The Big Idea: Birth Without Bias

Kimberly Seals Allers founded the Irth App, a platform that empowers Black and Brown parents with crowd-sourced, peer reviews to help combat bias in maternal healthcare.

By Leigh-Ann Jackson — September 7, 2023

According to the CDC, Black women in the US are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than White women. Vice President Kamala Harris has issued a nationwide Call to Action addressing these maternal mortality rates. And studies have shown that Black women receive a lower quality of obstetrical care than White women, including undertreatment of pain and delayed or inaccurate diagnoses. Structural racism and unconscious bias are often factors contributing to those outcomes.

Learning about reports like these, healthcare activist Kimberly Seals Allers asked herself: “Why is this happening, and more importantly, how am I going to change it?”

In The Big Idea: Birth Without Bias, a film presented by MIT Solve and made by the award-winning Redglass Pictures with support from HP, we follow the journey of the Queens, New York native as she shares how she was spurred to become a maternal healthcare activist after having her own traumatic birth experience.

Birth Without Bias is one in a trio of short documentaries that follow three innovators who are brilliant, bold and united by the desire to use technology, science and engineering to create radical change. 

WATCH The Big Idea: Birth Without Bias | MIT Solve

Motivated by her own harrowing birth experience, Kimberly Seals Allers is disrupting the hospital system to transform maternal health outcomes in the US.

Birthing a radical idea

The catalyzing event — Seals Allers’ experience giving birth as a Black, single mom and how lost she felt in the aftermath  — led her to create the Irth App (as in the word “birth” without the “b” for bias) in 2020. The digital platform allows Black and Brown parents to find and leave reviews and ratings of healthcare providers and share about their experiences in the maternity and infant care system. 

“We started Irth with a vision that we could be a social impact tool and that we could give our community power to inform and protect each other,” she says.

To date, Seals Allers estimates 72% of Irth App respondents have said that, at some point during their maternity journey they’ve had their pain level dismissed and their health requests were ignored or refused. She says these are the very patterns that can lead to harm, mortality and morbidity.

 

Learn more about HP’s digital equity partnership with MIT Solve and see the other films in The Big Idea series. 

 

Community data for equitable care

In addition to posting reviews of their doctors and hospitals, she turns the platform’s reviews into data to help hospitals improve their care and provide more respectful and equitable care for Black and Brown patients. She sees it as a hyper-local, community-driven approach to creating a solution. “Transparency is how we repair these relationships,” Seals Allers says. “As we tell hospitals, it’s the fastest way to community trust.”

Through its Birth Without Bias hospital pilot program, Irth’s data is used to inform anti-bias training and other patient-centered quality improvement projects for medical professionals. Such institutions as Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia and Detroit’s Ascension St. John’s Hospital have already signed on as pilot partners. 

Under the umbrella of her Narrative Nation multimedia company, Seals Allers also launched a Doula Ambassador Program, as well as the joy-focused “Birthright” podcast, which was prompted by her desire to “specifically counter the doom and gloom narrative that is too common in mainstream coverage of Black maternal health.”

“I came to this work as a journalist by trade — a writer, an author, a person who is deeply driven by the power of storytelling. But I don’t have technology or programming experience,” Seals Allers says.

A mother and Kimberly Seals Allers with a baby.

MIT Solve

Kimberly Seals Allers' goal is to eradicate structural racism and unconscious bias in obstetrical care .

From Queens to Cambridge

Joining the winners of MIT Solve’s 2021 Global Challenges has helped her fill that void. “It has given me access to developers and helped me surround myself with more folks who have that experience,” she says.

“We’re like matchmakers for superheroes — teaming up tech-savvy problem-solvers with folks who can help their brilliant ideas fly,” says Solve’s Executive Director Hala Hanna. “Their stories are not only inspirational,” Hanna says, “but are also a testament to the potential of technology when combined with an unwavering commitment to social impact.”

At MIT Solve 2022, the Patrick J. Mcgovern Foundation awarded Seals Allers $100,000 as part of its AI for Humanity Prize, enabling her to forge a partnership with the March of Dimes and its MaternalCARE work with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Even as she widens Irth’s scope, Seals Allers’ mission remains the same: Ensuring empowered, respectful and safe birth experiences for all.

 

Watch an inventor launch a device to deliver life-saving vaccines in The Big Idea: Last Mile

 

A pillar of HP’s Sustainable Impact goals is to accelerate equitable access to those who have been historically excluded so that they can participate, benefit from, and thrive in a digital economy. HP supports and champions those, like Seals Allers, using technology to make the world a better place. 

HP is a longtime sponsor of MIT Solve, providing focused support, prize funding, and sponsorship to social entrepreneurs advancing digital equity and sustainability solutions in their communities.
Tags
Healthcare / Leadership / Technology and Innovation / Diversity / Health / Community
Posted In
Impact

Recommended Stories

This inventor is teaching STEAM skills to Indigenous youth, one robot at a time, in The Big Idea

Danielle Boyer, a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, creates free robot kits that connect Indigenous students to their cultural past and teaches them tech skills that will shape their future.

From concrete to canopy: The revival of the UK’s Mersey Forest

With support from partners like the Arbor Day Foundation with funding from HP, this revitalized forest that stretches across the north of England has doubled the amount of woodland in the region.

Living in “The Moment,” with an eye toward the future

HP short film series The Moment returns to HP’s historic Silicon Valley garage, where tech leaders share personal stories, expert advice, and AI insights.