Maternal Mental Health Platform Wins Funding from Dartmouth Innovation Accelerator for Digital Health

The DoulaConnect team (l to r): Karen Fortuna, Margaret Emerson, Jill Berch, Saanvi Chilakapati, Emma Ricci-De Lucca, and Liz Murnane.

"The Digital Health Accelerator and the Magnuson Center are going to help us get to market, with both the funding and the resources and expertise," said Emma Ricci-De Lucca, a biomedical engineering PhD candidate and a co-founder of DoulaConnect. 

"The accelerator was a fantastic opportunity," said Saanvi Chilakapati, Dartmouth Master of Public Health (MPH) graduate and another co-founder of DoulaConnect. "To bring research outside of academia and into the hands of more users allows us to have more of an impact. The accelerator helped us learn more about the transition between research and a startup."

DoulaConnect emerged from research begun in the Patient Innovation Lab—directed by Karen Fortuna, associate professor of community and family medicine at Geisel School of Medicine—after a doula approached the lab about the challenges of postpartum depression and limited access to care. Under the leadership of Fortuna and utilizing funding from Geisel's Community Service Learning Grant, Jill Berch, another co-founder and MPH graduate, piloted a hybrid effectiveness and implementation randomized control trial of the 12-week AI-assisted text-based intervention to address this unmet need. The research found DoulaConnect reduced rates of perinatal depression and parental stress compared to treatment as usual.

Chilakapati then began further product development by working with Ricci-De Lucca, a third-year PhD candidate in the lab of Elizabeth Murnane, the Charles H. Gaut & Charles A. Norberg Assistant Professor of Engineering. Margaret Emerson also contributed to this work through her business, Collaborative Health Solutions and Consulting LLC.

The team plans to utilize the funding to finish developing their platform and test it with a larger group of stakeholders. Getting real-time feedback from doulas is imperative to the team, Berch said.

"The people we want to help are the ones driving this," she said.

Participating in the accelerator helped Berch think about how her research could reach more people through entrepreneurship.

"It's not something I would have ever personally thought about," she said. "Being able to see how DoulaConnect is developing with the accelerator program has been so amazing."

DIADH is a partnership between the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship and the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health. In the four years that the accelerator has run, the potential of AI has meant an explosion in innovations in digital health, according to Barry Schweitzer '82, associate director of the Magnuson Center.

"The caliber of projects this year showcased the real and wide-ranging impact that digital health products can have for patients and the population at large," Schweitzer said. "The potential for digital health innovation is expanding tremendously, and this cohort shows that the Dartmouth community continues to be at the forefront of this wave of life-changing technologies."

Teams were selected following a kick-off event, and participated in 12 weekly educational sessions, oftentimes paired with the inaugural cohort of the Dartmouth Innovation Accelerator for Engineering.

"The kickoff workshop helped us think about the end user and plan out the development timeline," one participant said. "The most concrete help was through the weekly Zoom sessions and peer to peer slide feedback."