Maven Clinic, a women’s and family digital health company, has launched a new benefit to help employees better manage the expenses associated with family planning.
The Maven Wallet app will help users calculate the cost of fertility, adoption, surrogacy and other reproductive health treatments and services, to better understand how much their benefits will cover. The app will also facilitate quicker reimbursement from employer allocated funds.
“Fundamentally there are just so many pain points around the payment of some of these services, because they are not baked into the core maternity model,” says Kate Ryder, CEO of Maven. “We realized we can help the company and the patient because we can add that reimbursement element into our platform.”
Infertility impacts 12% of women aged 15 to 44 years old, according to the Centers for Disease Control, though it is not just a female issue. In about 8% of couples with infertility, a male factor is the only identifiable cause, the CDC says. The average cost of fertility treatments is between $11,000 and $12,000, according to the Advanced Fertility Center of Chicago. A single round of in vitro fertilization costs on average $11,500, for example, and couples may have to undergo more than one cycle.
The Maven Wallet reimbursement program connects to the user’s bank account and provides access to the set amount of money an employer has allocated for fertility, surrogacy, adoption and other services. For example, if an organization sets aside $20,000 per employee for fertility treatments, the user can use Maven Wallet to find and pay for services, make benefits claims and monitor the remaining balance of those allocated funds.
Maven recently raised $45 million in Series C funding from investors, which Ryder says will be used to expand the wallet program as well as the other services Maven offers, like breast milk shipping and telehealth.
Zynga, the developer of the popular mobile games FarmVille and Words With Friends, is one of Maven’s 100 employer clients. The company uses Maven’s products and services in order to reduce some of their out of work stressors, especially related to fertility and family planning.
“Navigating the healthcare system can be really confusing, so we wanted to remove the hassle and offer real-time support to employees and their families throughout the process,” says Bryan Aycock, senior global benefits manager at Zynga. “This type of quick access to over 20 different types of women’s and family health providers for employees made sense to us.”
For Maven, providing fertility and family planning support is crucial to supporting employees at all stages of life and also helps to attract and retain a loyal workforce.
“It is so critical to have equality in your benefits,” Ryder says. “Whether an employee gets pregnant naturally or it’s a same sex couple who’s adopting, employers should have benefits to support both.”
