Here is your Forbes Daily Briefing for Friday, January 16th.

Today on Forbes, this CEO's $1.7 billion health startup began with moms.

Now she wants to expand to all women.

Before she became a mom, Marta Brailich- Kearns had worked in health care as both an executive

and a consultant trying to use data to improve care.

But even though she was deeply familiar with the industry's problems, giving birth to her daughter

was still a shocking experience.

She had access to great doctors and health insurance, but maternal care seemed haphazard.

Nothing was personalized.

Her doctors didn't reference much maternal health data to inform her care.

She struggled to find good advice about how she could have the healthiest baby possible.

She told Forbes, quote,

That was such a stark disconnect to everything I was working in health care.

So Braylick Kerns started asking questions of OBGYNs and fetal care specialists.

She learned that one in ten babies will be admitted to a neonatal care unit, far higher than she'd expected.

Many of those admissions were for risk factors like

preeclampsia, a complication that causes persistent high blood pressure that could have been

identified and treated earlier in the pregnancy. With her experience as a consultant on Arkansas's

Medicaid benefits for maternal care, and as an early executive at Flatiron Health,

which used data to improve cancer care, she decided that she could do better.

In 2021, she founded Pomelo Care to solve one of the most difficult problems in U.S. healthcare,

how to improve maternal and infant care to patients covered by Medicaid, a notoriously difficult

...