Bloom Care

Sao Paulo, Brazil · Femtech · Filed under: continuous care

Here is a fact about health care that is easy to state and hard to fix: most of it is designed for the moment something goes wrong. You feel a symptom, you find a doctor, you get 15 minutes, you leave. The system is a series of doors, and a woman's health - which stretches across menstruation, contraception, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, parenting and eventually menopause - gets carved up and handed to whoever is behind the next door.

Bloom Care, a Brazilian company founded in Sao Paulo in 2017, decided the doors were the problem. Its bet is almost boringly simple: instead of selling appointments, sell a relationship. One app, one continuous care plan, and a bench of gynecologists, obstetricians, pediatricians, psychologists and nutritionists who can see the whole picture rather than a 15-minute slice of it. The company describes itself as the largest virtual clinic for women's and family health in Brazil, and the first to try to cover the entire journey - from planning a pregnancy to raising a child - under one roof.

The interesting part is not the app. Lots of companies have built apps. The interesting part is who pays. Bloom Care runs mostly on a B2B2C model, which is a slightly clumsy way of saying that your employer or your health plan buys the service, and you - the member - get it as a benefit. This is a genuinely clever piece of positioning. Consumer health apps have to fight for attention in an app store crowded with meditation timers and step counters. Bloom Care skipped that fight and walked straight into the HR department, where "we'll pay for your people's gynecologist, pediatrician and therapist" is a surprisingly easy sentence to sell. The company cites more than 600 company and health-plan partners, a list that reportedly includes Sanofi, SulAmerica, Natura and Nestle.

Roberta Sotomaior, the co-founder and CEO, frames it in terms borrowed from an adjacent industry. "The fintech market took a service and built the best experience," she has said, "and we're doing this with the women's health journey." It is worth pausing on that comparison, because it is the whole thesis in one sentence. Fintech did not invent banking; it made banking feel like something a human being might actually want to use. Bloom Care did not invent gynecology. It is trying to make women's health feel continuous, reachable and designed - which, historically, it has not.

Notice what Bloom Care chooses to brag about. Not downloads. Not monthly active users. It brags about a 72% reduction in emergency-department visits and 53% fewer unnecessary cesareans - which is to say, it brags about things that didn't happen. That is an unusual and telling choice. When your customer is an employer or an insurer, the value of continuous care is measured in avoided cost: the ER trip that a phone call prevented, the C-section that better prenatal guidance made unnecessary. The incentives of the buyer and the health of the member point, for once, in the same direction.

This is also why the numbers that would normally sound like marketing - an NPS of 89, a 99% satisfaction score - are load-bearing here. In a benefits model, people have to actually use the thing, and keep using it, for years. A woman does not switch employers to get a better gynecologist. So Bloom Care has to be good enough that she opens the app for her contraception question at 25, her pregnancy at 32, her toddler's fever at 34, and her perimenopause at 47. Continuity is the product.

Bloom Care reaches its members through the organizations they already belong to. Among the partners cited across its own materials and Brazilian press: