In healthcare, and especially in women's health, there are only two categories of things: what we know, and what we don't.

 

In women's health, the second category is enormous.

 

This isn't only a data problem. It is what's sometimes called an epistemic injustice: whole conditions that women live with have gone uninvestigated, unnamed, and unexplained, because the people living with them were never treated as reliable witnesses to their own bodies. Women weren't required to be included in clinical trials until the early 1990s. Even now, excluding cancer, only a sliver of healthcare research funding goes towards conditions that affect women specifically. Not because these conditions are rare. Because almost no one has been paid to look.

 

We are not neutral about this.

 

When we founded Hesta, the founding belief was simple. Take the best of what clinical medicine, technology, operations and people have to offer, and build a healthcare system that works for every woman: the right care, at the right time, in the right place. We're starting with pregnancy and the postnatal years that follow.

 

That belief hasn't changed. Operationalising the known is not a phase we grow out of. It changes lives today, and we will keep doing it.

 

But we've come to believe something else just as firmly: you cannot operationalise your way out of a gap this size. If the evidence was never built, the data never captured, the solutions never tested, there is only so much we can operationalise. Somebody has to go and build it.

 

That is what Hesta Labs is.

 

Hesta Labs is governed by exactly the same values as Hesta. In addition, it has three guiding principles.

 

1. Invest in the unknown.

 

To set a new standard of excellence in healthcare requires us to do so.
 

Hesta Labs goes looking in the places nobody has looked properly: hormones across a life stage, clinical areas with no access pathway at all, monitoring for treatments people need but don't currently get, populations left out of "the data" by default. This requires patience; it is unglamorous work, and we do it anyway, because that's what changes what "known" even means for the next woman who walks into a clinic with a question nobody can currently answer.

 

2. Play, with rigour.

 

Hesta Labs is a playground, not a laboratory in the sterile sense. It is grounded in rigorous evidence and real scientific discipline, but it isn't reserved only for those with many letters after their name. Clinicians, engineers, technologists, academics and, importantly, the women whose health we're building this for, all have a seat.
 

Rigorous experimentation, playfulness, different disciplines and, most importantly, a willingness to try. 

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3. Seek, understand and act on care-changing data.

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The power of data is to change care, health and ultimate lives,

 

Data. Data. Data. Except which data matters, and for what, and for whom. We figure out the data that genuinely can make a difference to health, to care, to people's lives, and we invest in the loop of finding out what care-changing data actually is, then using it to change care and health outcomes, Hesta Labs isn't a separate company; it's Hesta's research and development arm, and the two run as one continuous loop.

 

Why now?

 

Some will ask why a company this young launches something like this now, rather than waiting until it's bigger, safer, more established. 
 

We didn't arrive at any of this by believing it. We tested it over many months. Using an Innovate UK grant, we ran a feasibility study in collaboration with Modality Partnership, delivering care to hundreds of women in East Surrey, in Yorkshire and in Birmingham, and asked three simple questions: is this clinically valuable, is this technically possible, and do women actually love it? The answer, on all three, was yes, yes and yes.

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Growing from this feasibility, we want to invest in the learning and experimentation infrastructure at Hesta, and so Hesta Labs was born.

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Welcome to the part we haven't figured out yet.

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 - Sujitha & Amanda