Startup Bringing Birth Control from the 1960s to the 21st Century

CHICAGO - July 7, 2015 - PRLog -- Chicago, IL (WEB) July 7th, 2014  -- Physician and entrepreneur, Jessica Walter MD, is turning to the internet to raise funding for her startup, Oviary. After a pregnancy scare on birth control in medical school, she was determined to find a better way to remember to take her pills.

The Pill remains the #1 choice for contraception in America - 9 million women use it for contraception every day. Theoretically, birth control is 99.7% effective. But in the real world, birth control is much less successful because of missed doses or a late start on the next month’s blister pack. Only half of birth control users take it perfectly.

About one in two pregnancies in America are unintended. If every birth control user was a perfect pill user, America would save $5.3 billion dollars in healthcare costs a year. Women would save $720 million dollars out of pocket in pregnancy tests, emergency contraception and co-payments. There would be 775,000 less unintended pregnancies and 270,000 less abortions.

Enter Oviary. Jessie and her team of engineers and designers created a device that provides immediate and discrete visual information on how a user is doing. The device is wirelessly connected and sends SMS text messages only when a user forgets. The smart system is able to provide tailored instructions on how to stay protected if a dose is missed. Every step of the way, Oviary was built with the modern woman in mind. It is detachable from a central dock for extra portability.  It works with any sized blister pack or birth control brand.

Today, Oviary is launching on Kickstarter today to raise $50,000 to start its initial manufacturing run. The team picked crowdfunding because of the opportunity to engage with users.  Birth control started a revolution in the 1960s - but, packaging hasn't changed much in 50 years. With the help of its backers, Oviary wants to take birth control from the 1960s to the 21st century.

About Jessie

Jessie has been a long time advocate of women's health.  Before Harvard Medical School, Jessie spent a year working in Peru to promote cervical cancer screening and picked up Spanish along the way. As a medical student, she counseled hundreds of women on contraception in low resource health settings in Boston. Currently, she is a resident physician in OB-GYN at Prentice Women's Hospital at Northwestern University.  When not working on Oviary or seeing patients, Jessie spends her time sampling ice cream, planning trips and playing with her cat.