Ovum AI
Ovum
- Product Strategy and Development
- UI/UX Design
- Testing Validation
- Commercial Advice
- Creative Direction
Ovum is an intelligent health journal for women. Using AI to encourage consistent logging of symptoms, tracking of biometric data and medical record integration, the app is able to create a comprehensive health profile at any time throughout the user's history. The mission of Ovum’s founder, Dr. Ariella Heffernan-Marks, is to provide a platform where women can understand, manage, and take control of their health, guided by intelligent, personalised insights — ultimately giving them agency over their bodies, for life.
Problem to solve
There’s a lack of access and agency to women’s health data in Australia. This leads to poorer treatment in clinical settings and a longitudinal data gap that’s crucial to medical research.
Bold idea
Putting women in charge of their health data through a platform that intelligently tracks and reports symptoms, creating a proactive and open conversation with medical professionals.
"Nakatomi brought with them an incredibly thorough and motivated team of product designers, business strategists, engineers, software developers, and marketing gurus. Without their expertise and unconditional willingness to make sure every deliverable was perfect – Ovum would not have had the success it has, in just two years."
Dr. Ariella Heffernan-Marks
Founder
How we got there
A strategy for a new start-up.
Ovum’s initial ambition was multifaceted, aiming to streamline data collection by storing all scripts, bloods, and reports for patients and doctors, tracking and visualising reproductive hormones, creating a symptom calendar for pelvic pain, and providing personalised contraception recommendations. It was intended as a platform for women to centralise all their medical data, especially for those without a personal GP.
During our Discovery Phase, we concluded that a platform like this needed to uphold the continuity of care advocated by the RACP (Royal Australasian College of Physicians), which recommends relational continuity, informational continuity, and management continuity.
It became clear that we had to narrow our focus and provide unique value that reinforced the GP as part of the process. Ovum had to work with the current medical system, not compete with it.
We revisited our founder’s purpose of empowering women through transforming their healthcare and formulated a vision: To improve health literacy for women through technology. Using this as our guiding principle, we worked to create a more focused app with features tailored to address a specific need.
We carved our own space in the market.
There is a myriad of tools that help with women’s reproductive health. Apps for period tracking, fertility, pregnancy, menopause, and pelvic pain do an incredible job of educating women about their body’s hormonal needs and symptoms.
But while reproductive health frequently serves as the foundation for many concerns, there are other issues that remain unaddressed simply because they don’t fall into the women's health category. From chronic illnesses to bone diseases, there are plenty of conditions that need to be monitored and reported.
Medication dosages, side effects, and symptoms have historically been linked to the male body, leading to a shortage of women-specific health data. As a result, many treatments and protocols are not designed for women, often resulting in less effective care. By giving them the ability to monitor their health journey and submit their data to research, Ovum gives women more agency in hospitals, where experiences by women are frequently overlooked.
So instead of focusing solely on reproductive health and cardiovascular health, we decided that the best strategy was to target the whole body — creating a holistic picture of health that’s indisputable in any clinical setting.
This meant that in a mature reproductive health market, we didn't have to struggle to distinguish ourselves. Our audience could keep their beloved apps and still find value in Ovum.
Creating the business model.
We like to approach modelling startups financials by taking a bottom-up approach to sizing the market. Dr. Heffernan-Marks had already conducted numerous surveys and pricing questionnaires that served as a solid foundation to build business models on.
The TAM was identified as all women aged 15 to 64, a demographic encompassing a significant global population. We refined the SAM to users of menstruation, contraception, or fertility apps — a tech-savvy segment actively seeking digital health solutions. The SOM was further narrowed to women experiencing acute health issues, providing a clearly defined target for initial market entry.
We calculated our potential market share by analysing the penetration of existing apps and identifying market gaps. This analysis helped set realistic capture rates for our product and estimate potential market share.
One difficult area to model is CoGs like cloud costs and token usage. A key objective of our testing phase is to evaluate real world usage versus our hypothetical models.
Designing and building the app.
Ovum is a health-tracking app that enables women to monitor their health data both qualitatively and quantitatively throughout their life, integrating symptom logs, medical results, and biometric data. It uses a large language model to understand and explain user questions while visualising their health trends over time. Medical reports can be downloaded and summarised, contributing to the app’s knowledge base and providing an even more accurate view of their health.
All this data can be exported and shared with GPs or any healthcare provider, maintaining the RACP’s continuity of care. In the future, Ovum can be an integral part of the doctor-patient relationship, becoming an essential tool for care management.
The current state of Ovum is just a glimpse of the greater vision. Dr. Heffernan-Marks is currently working diligently to attract customers and secure investments. There’s an extensive roadmap planned to achieve Ovum’s ultimate ambition, which will continue to find strategic partnerships to ensure its development.
