Setting a new benchmark for women's healthcare

As a young woman, Dupé Burgess set her mind on becoming a doctor. Attracted by the job security and caring for those in need, she trained in London and began an eight-year career in the NHS.

But flaws in the NHS became increasingly apparent. Treating one person at a time, in a bureaucratic, fractured system, started to feel like an uphill battle. Disillusioned and burnt out, Burgess left the NHS to try something different.

Burgess’ brother suggested that she look into management consulting, and she took a job as a senior associate at the Boston Consulting Group, throwing herself into her work in the private sector. She went back to basics, first learning about P&L sheets and cashflows, and eventually began to understand the ins and outs of running a business. She thrived in the role, using data to help solve clients’ complex challenges.

Three years into her role at BCG, the pandemic hit, forcing Burgess to reflect on her career as a doctor: “I started to become a lot more aware of inequality generally during that time, but especially around healthcare inequalities,” she says.

She thought back to the complicated, fragmented pathways she saw women go through in the NHS to get gynaecological healthcare. But this time, instead of feeling frustrated and helpless, she started to imagine a solution.

Three years ago, Burgess founded Bloomful, a start-up building innovative tools that simplify women’s healthcare. Bloomful’s goal is to meet women in the doctor’s office by building visual, easy-to-use software that clinicians can use to enhance their decision-making. “Sadly, a lot women’s health is guesswork. Historically, healthcare has been built for men and extrapolated to women,” says Burgess, whose aim is to start streamlining and refining care pathways for people dealing with issues like endometriosis, PCOS, PMDD, chronic UTIs and other ‘benign’ gynaecological conditions.

Bloomful offers providers data-driven insights on treatment effectiveness, guidance from its own clinical team, and programmes to help treat pain, weight, sleep and fertility issues. For patients, the hope is that this translates to effective treatment, but also, a sense of being heard by their doctor instead of dismissed.

Bloomful has been running on £400,000 that Burgess raised herself over the last two years from angel investors, including The Conduit Connect and Google for Startups’ Black Founders Fund. Bloomful is a tight-knit, four-person team with the recent addition of a full stack engineer named Luke, who is also pursuing a degree in medicine.

The company has been through several iterations of its business model, including selling direct to consumers and to employers. But Burgess’ current focus is on the system: “If we embed these care pathways into insurance companies’ processes and the NHS, we can really start to do things at scale.” She is also eyeing expansion to the US, where the business focus would be reducing payers’ (namely health insurance companies) healthcare costs.

Could you help Bloomful get to next level? Perhaps you know of a primary care (GP) provider who may want to try Bloomful for free for its patients or a healthcare pro that could make a transformative board member. Are you an angel looking for your next investment? If so, reach out to Dupé Burgess by email or on LinkedIn.