Olivia is a Western Australian company founded by two women who kept meeting the same problem from different sides: a maternity system full of careful, skilled work, held together by a booklet that goes missing.
Aimee leads the clinical case and the conversations with maternity services, clinicians and mothers across the state. She takes Olivia to the people it has to work for, and brings what they say back into the design.
Deliah leads the product design, and the conversations with maternity services, clinicians and mothers across the state. Every screen has been modelled by her against the way maternity care is really delivered.
Health software has a long history of being designed for the organisation and handed to the clinician. We are trying to do the opposite, and it is the reason Olivia is taking as long as it is.
Not a reimagining of maternity care. We work from the WA handheld pregnancy record itself, visit by visit, so what a clinician already knows still holds true on screen.
Every screen is walked through with women who have carried the paper record and midwives working across metropolitan and regional WA, before it is built and again after.
We would rather get the record right than ship early. Nothing goes near a woman's care until the people responsible for that care are satisfied it should.
The paper handheld record already carries an unusual idea inside it. In most of health care, the record is held by the institution and the patient is given a copy. In maternity, it is the other way around: the woman holds it, and the system reads it.
That idea is worth keeping. It treats a pregnant woman as the person most invested in her own care and the most reliable custodian of it, which she is. Olivia is not an attempt to take the record back off her and put it in a hospital system. It is an attempt to give her a better version of the thing she already carries.
So the design starts from her. What she sees is written in language meant for her, not clinical shorthand she has to decode. What she decides is recorded early and calmly, not in a corridor in labour. What her team needs to know follows her between services without her having to remember a booklet.
And what protects her is handled with care. Access is scoped to the role that needs it and every view is logged, because a record that follows a woman everywhere has to be one she can trust everywhere.
We would rather get the record right alongside clinicians and women than ship it early.Aimee Eddy and Deliah Boni
We are open about the stage we are at. Olivia is not in service yet, and we would rather say so plainly than imply otherwise.
Working through the antenatal schedule visit by visit, with the mother app and clinician portal designed alongside women and midwives across metropolitan and regional WA.
Conversations with maternity services about models of care, clinical governance and how Olivia sits alongside the systems they already run.
A supervised pilot in a real service, with real women and their care teams, evaluated properly before anything scales further.
If you work in maternity care, research it, fund it, or have carried the paper record yourself, we would like to talk.
Email the founders