What is the Irth App for Black Mother Health?

Kimberly Seals Allers likes to say this Irth, the app she created to give BIPOC births the power to control their doctors, is something she wishes she had when she was giving birth. “I did all the research … really hoping to have a great birth experience,” she explained in a conversation with SheKnows editor-in-chief Erika Janes on SHE Media Co-Lab Whole Life Health Event at SXSW in Austin, Texas, last March. A journalist by profession, Allers used all her investigative skills to find a good hospital and a doctor who would take care of her. But in the end, all her careful scrutiny didn’t matter.

“I went to a highly rated hospital and left wondering what happened to me,” Allers recalled. She found herself fighting for the kind of care she knew was standard practice, and was overwhelmed by “the level of disrespect, the ways in which the things I asked for were ignored.”

At first, Allers blamed herself. “Did I do something wrong? Did I miss something in my research?” she remembered wondering. But as the troubling experience led her into the field of maternal health advocacy, she learned that the mistreatment wasn’t her fault. Instead, it fell back on internalized racial prejudice.

“I often say that the hospital toilet was a great equalizer,” Allers said. Her master’s degree from Columbia University, her career in journalism — none of it mattered. “Even black women with six-figure incomes, dual degrees, are more likely to die — and their babies are more likely to die — than a white woman who didn’t finish high school,” Allers explained, citing data from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Further proof: elite athletes like Serena Williams and Allyson Felix — women with fame, health and financial stability on their side — have spoken out about their terrifying experiences of stillbirth. “This is not a social economy,” Allers explained. “And I think it’s really important to recognize that, because … then we have to have this important but maybe uncomfortable conversation about prejudice and racism.”

Irth, Allers hopes, will be the driving force behind this conversation. She described the app as “our Yelp for safe black birth,” a place where “black and brown birth mothers can find and leave reviews of their OB-GYNs, birthing hospitals and pediatricians,” she explained. “We’re all about crowdsourcing and sharing publicly where we’re getting good care [and] where we don’t.” The name, he added, is a reference to the word “birth,” but as he says, “we dropped the ‘b’ for ‘prejudice.’

The Irth team draws data from each review, resulting in valuable feedback to help hospitals improve their care. “What can we learn from the lived experience of black and brown people?” Allers said. “We literally help [providers] improve their care, but we [also] to hold them accountable. A lot of what happens to black women goes unnoticed.”

Irth’s own birth story began in 2018 as a “mother-son project,” an app that Allers originally developed and marketed with her STEM-minded teenage son. “He helped create the first wireframes for Irth and I’m really proud of that,” Allers said. The pair’s first big win came at an MIT hackathon. Then grant money started rolling in, allowing them to expand. Allers said she “cried all day” when she was able to hire her first employee at Irth.

Now, the app serves patients at hospitals in eight different states, with “many more in the pipeline,” Allers says. As its user base grows, the Irth team seeks to approach the Black maternal health crisis from both sides. Yes, app data can be a critical tool for providers to improve their care, but seeing a hospital or doctor in the app also puts the power back in the hands of patients. Just as a disgruntled Yelp reviewer can impact a restaurant’s business with a bad review, an Irth user can now critique a provider or hospital in a way that is valuable to both the practice and other patients.

“Irth strongly believes that as black women who have power as consumers in our world, we are not victims of any black motherhood crisis,” Allers emphasized. “We are actually powerful agents of change.”

It’s a fundamental mindset shift. “We have maternal mortality review boards … that look at what goes wrong when a mother dies, but we don’t think that’s a sustainable strategy,” Allers explained. “We cannot try to solve this problem from the grave. With Irth, we say, let’s go live, which seems like a much better strategy. We can really capture a powerful experience and use it to prevent damage.”

Irth seeks to simultaneously improve care while empowering black and brown women who give birth. “The Black mother’s health narrative tells a lot of people that they’re lucky to be alive,” Allers says. “The hospital will tell them, ‘You’re fine, your baby is fine’ and they just want to move on. But we said, “yeah, that might be true— and whatever happened to you matters… We are not victims. We are strong people. And we’re proud of how we harness that power.”