HITLAB Team • May 5, 2025
The Pre- and Postpartum Support And Recovery Gap: Enhanced Care and Prevention of Complications
The postpartum period for most women often involves harsh physical and emotional changes which are not commonly discussed. For instance, new parents face challenges such as pain, discomfort, and exhaustion, with symptoms ranging from bleeding to headaches. The strain can lead to pelvic floor disorders such as sexual dysfunction and diastasis recti. It is well known that the postpartum period is marred with psychological issues. These difficulties hinder parents’ daily functioning thereby impacting work, childcare, and domestic tasks.
Pre- and postpartum management is further complicated by a shortage of doctors time, leaving the birthing parents’ concerns insufficiently addressed. Often, these visits provide minimal screening and cursory examinations. Further, postpartum care in the US is confined to a brief six-week doctor’s visit amid a stark lack of support during a critical period. Without required support, birthing parents become susceptible to persistent and worsening health problems, jeopardizing their quality of life.
What Is Myri Health & How Is It Helping?
Myri Health is a healthcare-technology company dedicated to revolutionizing pregnancy support and postpartum recovery for birthing parents worldwide. Myri Health fills persistent gaps in postpartum care by giving parents far more support than standard practice currently offers. Building pelvic-floor and core strength—needs that are routinely overlooked in routine follow-up visits—remains a core focus of the platform. Beyond postpartum, Myri provides week-specific education, symptom tracking, and AI-guided risk assessments throughout pregnancy, empowering parents well before birth.
Myri Health’s technology is a mobile app that provides holistic support to birthing parents by bypassing barriers to in-person care, adding crucial touchpoints to the health system and providing ongoing guidance to reduce risk of postpartum complication.
Myri Health presents a promising advancement in postpartum care. It could help navigate the challenges of postpartum phase with evidence-based, personalized and data-driven solutions.
How it Helps
The Myri Health app supports comprehensive postpartum recovery by offering physical therapy guidance, evidence-based health information, community support, and health tracking—all within a single mobile platform available in over 166 countries.
The app can be accessed through individual download and subscription, or deployed at scale through partnerships with public and private health plans, healthcare organizations, and government programs.
By leveraging digital access, Myri Health aims to overcome traditional barriers to postpartum care, such as limited service availability, lack of insurance coverage, and transportation challenges.
Evaluation of the Myri Health App
Methodology
HITLAB experts conducted a heuristic evaluation of the platform using Jakob Nielsen’s usability principles, a widely recognized framework for assessing user interface design.
The evaluation examined the typical user experience from the perspectives of two user types:
- Pregnancy Support – A 30-week pregnant accountant seeking to proactively prepare for her postpartum journey.
- Postpartum Recovery – A school teacher who recently gave birth and is focused on maintaining her physical and emotional well-being during the recovery phase.
Findings
Strengths: HITLAB identified several key strengths of the Myri Health mobile application. The app was praised for its consistent and well-organized structure across all pages, its clean and visually appealing minimalist design, its strong support for user control and autonomy, and its overall reliability with minimal errors.
The app’s feature, PlatePal, accurately identify different food items on a plate and calculate calories. The feature works seamlessly, and not only is the app able to accurately identify varied foods but is also able to provide a count estimate for the said food items.
The app offers users personalized insights by analyzing statistical trends in their medical data, including pre- and postpartum health parameters, and generates individualized risk assessments. It supports data collection across a wide range of postpartum care activities—such as milk pumping, infant feeding, diastasis recti monitoring, and scar management. For self-care, users can log personal information like blood glucose levels, blood pressure, sleep, weight, and maintain journals and photo records. Additionally, the app visualizes blood sugar trends to help users better understand and manage their health. These features empower users with private, comprehensive insights into their well-being, highlighting areas of strength and concern. Myri Health also includes an AI-powered chatbot that provides real-time assistance, enhancing user support and engagement.
Recommendations
HITLAB experts provided several high-impact recommendations to enhance the app’s usability and functionality. While the app effectively anticipates and supports the collection of diverse user data, it is crucial that this information is displayed in an accessible and user-friendly format. Activities recorded within the app should include clear date and time stamps to help users track their progress and maintain accurate records. For better usability, HITLAB strongly recommends the inclusion of a clearly labeled Help and FAQ section, which should also offer users guidance on how to contact the development team if they encounter issues on any page.
Additional recommendations with moderate to low impact include improving the visual design of links and buttons to make them more obviously interactive, and expanding content offerings—for example, increasing the number of available articles and adding more music options in the ‘Breathing’ section, as current choices are limited.
Evaluation of the Myri Health App
Myri Health is actively working to bridge critical gaps in postpartum care by addressing needs that are often underrepresented in traditional healthcare settings. The platform offers comprehensive support across multiple dimensions of postpartum recovery, giving women access to tools and resources they may otherwise miss during the limited number of follow-up visits with healthcare providers. This approach holds significant promise for improving clinical outcomes and delivering more equitable care for a sensitive and underserved population.
” Myri Health is tackling a real and often overlooked gap in postpartum care. By giving women better access to tools and insights during such a critical time, it has the potential to make a real difference—not just in individual health outcomes, but in how we think about supporting postpartum recovery.” — Stan Kachnowski, Chair, HITLAB
“Myri Health exists to make every mother feel informed, heard, and supported at every step of her journey. HITLAB’s rigorous review affirms that vision and propels us to keep innovating for healthier pregnancies and stronger postpartum outcomes.” Pinkey Patel, Founder & CEO, Myri Health
With continued refinement in usability and clearer presentation of health insights, Myri Health is well-positioned to increase its impact, offering a more intuitive and effective solution for both pre- and postpartum care.
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