Bridging the Gap in Maternal Health Equity with Kim Smith, Founder and CEO of Health Evolve

This week on Tech Can’t Save Us, host Paul David is joined by Kim Smith, Founder and CEO of Health Evolve, a South Carolina-based femtech company building patient-centred technologies at the intersection of care and culture. Kim founded Health Evolve in 2023 following the loss of her daughter Lauren to HELLP Syndrome, naming the company’s flagship platform in her honour.

They discuss why the patient’s voice is the most underrated lever in closing health equity gaps, and how Health Evolve co-designed Lauren — with birthing women, nurses, and physicians across urban and rural communities — to be genuinely inclusive. Lauren supports women across a full 100 weeks of care, from preconception through early parenting, combining remote blood pressure and glucose monitoring, an AI-driven personalised education curriculum, and a telemedicine suite with real-time translation to fill the critical gaps between a high-risk woman’s average six hours of provider contact throughout pregnancy.

The conversation covers how Health Evolve is navigating long enterprise sales cycles by building a Research and Community Partnerships division as a deliberate profit centre, with an active clinical validation study at South Carolina’s largest academic hospital and a data partnership with the University of South Carolina drawing on 50 years of birth data. Kim also shares leadership lessons from 18 years spanning Tenet Healthcare’s 24 national markets, and her approach to protecting mental health whilst carrying a life-or-death mission — including her first-ever Power 24, a quarterly solo reset she’s making non-negotiable.

Find more about Health Evolve here: https://healthevolve.co

Follow Kim Smith here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimsmithceo/