The growth engine hiding in a 28-week order set | Andrea Ippolito

SimpliFed is a maternal care at home platform focused on virtual breastfeeding and baby feeding support, delivering insurance-covered care from pregnancy through the first year postpartum.

In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Andrea Ippolito, CEO and Founder of SimpliFed, to learn how the company built a referral engine that is on track to receive referrals representing about five percent of all births in the US this year.

Topics Discussed:

• How Andrea validated that parents would pay out of pocket for feeding support before pursuing insurance contracts
• Why SimpliFed enters health plans bottoms up through the provider credentialing page rather than selling as a vendor
• Why the company moved away from a large commercial team and built a credentialing team instead
• How integration into the 28-week prenatal order set inside OB electronic medical records became the growth engine
• The three-legged stool behind SimpliFed's growth: patient demand, health plan coverage, and referral partners
• Why SimpliFed spent three years on a clinical study with UMass
• Current coverage: roughly 50% of commercial health plans, Medicaid in 12 states, all 50 states commercially, and two national TRICARE contracts
• What it would take to grow from referrals representing five percent of US births to fifty percent

GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:

• Validate willingness to pay before chasing contracts: Andrea knew insurance contracts would take years, so the first test was whether parents would pay out of pocket. She recruited local lactation consultants as 1099 providers, ran the service on commercial off-the-shelf software, and let real payment behavior justify the harder infrastructure investments that followed.

• Know whether you are a vendor or a provider: SimpliFed originally built a large commercial team, then learned it did not need one. As Andrea said, "We are an in-network provider with a health plan. We're not a vendor." Providers enter health plans bottoms up through the provider credentialing page, so the company replaced its commercial engine with a strong credentialing team.

• Distribution beats proprietary software: Andrea said that with AI, "having proprietary software and all that is not as exciting as it used to be. It's about distribution." SimpliFed's growth runs on EMR and API integrations, not product novelty.

• Make the referral structured, not handcrafted: Posters and handcrafted outreach were fine for customer discovery, but growth came from integration into the 28-week prenatal order set template inside the OB's electronic medical record. The provider refers without changing their workflow, and the consented, structured referral data makes the motion scalable, predictable, and high growth.

• Augment the clinician instead of competing with them: With one in three counties lacking access to OB-GYNs and fewer OBs entering practice, SimpliFed positions itself as taking work off providers' plates. OB adoption depends on showing the company complements their care rather than threatening it.

• Buy evidence early because it cannot be rushed: SimpliFed's clinical study with UMass took three years and a full IRB process. The results, including 16 weeks longer breastfeeding duration and lower PHQ-9 scores at six months, are what make the ROI case to health plans, whose number one postpartum cost driver is maternal mental health.

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