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Glow
Glow, a fertility app made for the iPhone, helps women track their fertility.
Glow, available now for iOS, is Max Levchin’s first step in his goal of revolutionizing healthcare while helping women to conceive naturally, without having to turn to costly fertility treatments.
The app, which is promoted with the tagline “Conceive With Confidence,” is essentially a fertility tracker that hones the information and advice it provides based on answers provided by users and augments that with existing data and crowd-sourced analysis.
With enough securely stored personal information it can pinpoint the best time during each monthly cycle for conception. Once pregnant, data gathered by the app can be exported as a PDF and shared with a doctor or specialist if need be.
Levchin, who made his fortune as one of the brains behind PayPal, hopes to have a similarly revolutionary impact on healthcare with this new venture.
The company’s ultimate aim is to bring equality of treatment and a reduction of costs to the healthcare system, and it has chosen to target fertility first because according to its data, the fertility treatment industry in the U.S. generates $ 5 billion a year, partly because such treatments are elective — not covered in standard health insurance policies — and partly because of a seeming lack of control or access to relevant information that would make conception simpler.
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As it is, one in three healthy U.S. women aged between 35 and 39 will fail to conceive after a year of trying.
Although the app is free, users can opt into a $ 50-a-month fund called Glow First. The idea is that a woman trying to start a family with the help of the app also pays into the fund for a period of 10 months.
After 10 months of trying to conceive but failing, every women who has been paying into the fund from the same point in time will receive an equal share of what’s been amassed to help to pay towards fertility treatments instead.
The company guarantees that it doesn’t keep a single cent of payments made and has even started the ball rolling by paying in an initial $ 1 million from its own pocket.
Glow is available to download now via Apple’s App Store
