Stories from the Field: Karishma Patel

What inspired you to focus your work on women’s health?

Before Ema, I was running a direct-to-consumer platform for women navigating their health. And I kept watching the same thing happen. Women would come to us because they had nowhere else to turn. Their symptoms had been dismissed by doctors, their questions kept going unanswered, and they were losing trust in a system that was supposed to be there for them.

Women's health is underfunded and under-researched, sure, but the thing that really pulled me in was different. It was that women were walking around with real questions about their own bodies, and no one credible was answering them. So much of that gap was emotional: women needing to feel heard and taken seriously alongside getting information that was actually accurate. I realized that if we could build something that got the clinical side and the emotional side right in the same place, we could actually shift how millions of women experience their own health. That's what became Ema.

What women’s health challenge is your organization working to address, and what approaches have you implemented to help alleviate this challenge?

The core problem is that women get fragmented, impersonal care at every stage of life—maternal, mental, wellness—without a single trusted place that understands both the clinical and the human side of what they're actually going through. Ema is an emotionally intelligent AI care platform built specifically for women's health, and there are a few things we've done to make sure we get it right.

We trained the platform on over 10 million real health conversations, so it reflects how women actually talk about their bodies, not sanitized clinical language. We've built clinical rigor from day one, working with more than 50 clinical and expert advisors so the emotional intelligence never gets in the way of accuracy. And we've made Ema easy to reach, private, and available the moment a question comes up, instead of stuck waiting weeks for a doctor's appointment to get real information.

What we've ended up with is care built specifically for women's health first, which is exactly why it also ends up working better for everyone.

How has collaboration with the Milken Institute Women’s Health Network supported or accelerated your work?

We're brand new to the Milken Institute Women's Health Network, so we're really just getting started and still figuring out everything that's possible. The value that has already stood out is access, being connected to other members and getting to work on the problems we're collectively trying to solve. There's something real about being in a room with researchers, clinicians, and builders who are working toward the same goal, because it means we aren't tackling the women's health gap alone. We're excited to see where these relationships go and to contribute as much as we take from the community.

What opportunities remain in this area to drive progress, and how do you see the Women's Health Network supporting?

The biggest opportunity is closing the structural gaps that keep the whole field behind. Women's health still receives a small fraction of research and venture funding. The data behind women's conditions are thin. And there isn't a real playbook yet for deploying AI in women's health responsibly, with evidence and the right oversight.

For us to move from promising tools to actual standards of care, we need rigorous evidence, real pathways into health systems and payers, and shared standards for what responsible AI in women's health actually looks like. This is where the network can do things no single company can do alone. It can catalyze research partnerships and open up access to data. It can connect innovators to the health systems, payers, and policymakers who actually bring solutions to scale. And it can convene the field to set credible standards and push for the funding and policy shifts that treat women's health as the priority it should be.

This problem is too big for any of us to solve alone.