AI can speed up your fertility diagnosis
When it comes to diagnosing and treating infertility, time is the most precious resource. Startup Levy Health takes that ticking clock seriously.
The story: Levy Health has built a clinical decision support tool to help fertility doctors diagnose women with infertility and underlying endocrine conditions faster.
Here’s how it works: Before a patient even sees their fertility specialist, the provider gets to read their Levy Health report.
- The software analyzes a patient’s questionnaire, biomarkers, and labs and narrows down a list of 110 potential diagnoses to a few potential conditions a patient might have.
- The Levy team says this has led to a 50% reduction in time to diagnosis.
What’s new here: If you’ve been following AI’s creep through the healthcare SaaS space, you might be thinking this is just another clinical decision support tool. While algorithm-based clinical tools aren’t new, they are in the fertility space.
- A fertility-specific clinical decision support tool can be especially useful because many doctors who see infertility patients aren’t endocrine specialists. In other words, they aren’t equipped to screen for common underlying conditions like PCOS and thyroid disease.
Why this matters: Getting answers sooner can be a game changer for people trying to conceive (TTC). When it comes to solving the problems of timing and access in fertility, femtech innovators are testing out many approaches.
- Levy Health co-founder Caroline Mitterdorfer began her own fertility journey at 27 with an early-stage cancer diagnosis. After seeing how slowly fertility diagnoses happened, she became a fertility advocate and eventually a founder.
- The team scrapped an initial foray into the European market because they didn’t want to pass costs down to consumers. They’ve since launched in 2023 with several U.S.-based fertility care B2B contracts.
- Other notable players in the space include fertility employee benefits provider Carrot, at-home hormone testing kit Mira, and fertility clinic chain Pozitivf.