Episode 127: The Quest to Connect BIPOC Women to Medical Professionals

Finding the right doctor can be difficult and finding one with a similar background or who looks like you can be even harder when you’re a part of an underserved community. This issue, which often impacts women of color, was exactly what Ashlee Wisdom and Eddwina Bright set out to solve.

Enter Health in Her Hue, a digital platform that connects Black women and women of color to culturally competent and sensitive healthcare providers and offers health information and content that centers on their lived experience. Founded by Ashlee and Eddwina, Health in Her Hue helps Black women navigate the healthcare system and find doctors who address their unique concerns.

In today’s episode, Ashlee and Eddwina discuss the importance of advocacy, representation, and support when it comes to infertility in the Black community.

Guest: Ashlee Wisdom and Eddwina Bright, Health in Her Hue
Host: Dan Bulger

For more information, visit Progyny’s Podcast page and Progyny’s Education page for more resources.

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Here are some highlights from this episode:

The Creation of Health and Her Hue
02:00 – 02:55

Ashlee Wisdom: Health in Her Hue started back in 2018, when, quite frankly, I got frustrated with seeing all the data and headlines about Black women’s poor health outcomes, the disparities in health care and not really seeing any innovative solutions that were addressing the unique needs of women of color. The platform primarily started as a content platform to make health information more culturally relevant to Black women while engaging and empowering them to navigate the healthcare system. That got a lot of traction and our content really resonated with Black women. We brought it to them where they were on social media, and we built a strong community around that. From building that community, we were able to learn some of the additional pain points that these women were having, as they were navigating the healthcare system.

Changing the Conversation
03:28 – 04:18

Ashlee Wisdom: Maternal mortality is the number one thing that we talk about because the disparities are so disturbing. Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy related complications, compared to our racial counterparts. Beyond that, we’re more likely to die from heart disease or we’re more likely to be obese and have diabetes. Across health outcomes and health indicators, Black women feel worse than our racial counterparts. I really wanted to shift the conversation around just focusing too much on maternal mortality when there are all these other health conditions that are disproportionately impacting Black women, which, at the end of the day, ties back into why our maternal outcomes are far worse than our racial peers.

Lack of Representation
08:27 – 09:19

Eddwina Bright: We hear from our users that some of the challenges around their access to health content is that they don’t see themselves reflected in these articles or videos. There’s a story that a user told us that she was going for mastectomy, and from all the photos that she saw, none of them were of Black women. She couldn’t envision what she would look like post-surgery. Our aim is to ensure that our users and members see themselves reflected in all the content that we develop. The great thing about having a community is that women share their experiences with us. They not only trust us as a platform, but also as a community platform. Women have shared with us that when they’ve gone for fertility treatments, they don’t see other women who look like them in the waiting room or that all the photos in the waiting room don’t look like them. They often feel like, “Do I belong here or is something wrong with me?”

The Future of Health in Her Hue
09:53 – 10:29

Eddwina Bright: We want to make Health in Her Hue the first touch point for women of color as they’re making any decision related to their health care. This ranges from trying to find trusted providers or trying to find trusted health content based on whatever health issue  they’re concerned about. Then, we want to give them access to the community for support and navigating their healthcare. We see our platform really being a robust and dynamic platform that serves as a guide to women of color who are trying to feel empowered in finding the best care for them, as well as a community to have as support.