How Mother of Fact Is Scaling Nutrition Care to Save Mothers and Babies
StartUp Health community member Emily Sylvester, MS, RD, CEO & Founder of Mother of Fact, is transforming maternal health with a digital-first platform that embeds reimbursable, culturally tailored nutrition care into women’s health workflows – advancing health moonshots in women’s health, children’s health, and food as medicine.
In maternal health, few interventions are as simple and powerful as nutrition. Yet for decades, nutrition has been sidelined in clinical care – treated as an afterthought instead of a frontline defense against pregnancy complications, maternal deaths, and lifelong chronic disease.
StartUp Health community member Emily Sylvester, MS, RD, CEO & Founder of Mother of Fact, is determined to change that. A registered dietitian, board-certified lactation consultant, and mother of four, Emily built Mother of Fact to make nutrition a standard, reimbursable part of maternal care. Her inspiration came from a devastating moment while working in Boston clinics: a baby on her caseload died, not because the care was inadequate, but because it arrived too late.
“One-third of maternal deaths are directly related to malnutrition or lack of nutrition care,” Emily explains. “We can prevent that if we scale access to dietitian-led care.”
The First Thousand Days
Mother of Fact’s model is built around the first thousand days – from family planning through the child’s second birthday – when nutrition is most critical for long-term health. The platform connects at-risk pregnant people with registered dietitians through telehealth appointments and daily monitoring. Patients pay nothing out of pocket, while clinics bill for the reimbursable services.
Unlike one-time nutrition referrals, Mother of Fact embeds dietitians seamlessly into OB/GYN and women’s health workflows. Families get continuous support through a digital-first platform that “lives on their phones,” providing guidance not only on high-risk conditions like gestational diabetes or preeclampsia, but also on real-world challenges like food access, WIC benefits, or culturally familiar meal planning.
As Emily puts it, “We know nutrition reimbursement is complicated, and not every state is the same. But hospital systems are leaving revenue on the table. Partnering with us allows them to tap into unrecognized reimbursement while giving patients care they desperately need.”
Wildly Different Nutrition Care
Mother of Fact’s results show the power of upstream, continuous nutrition care:
60% lower cost compared to in-house dietitian models
70% of births were uncomplicated
86% of at-risk patients avoided gestational diabetes
30% reduction in nutrition-related complications
9-day median time from referral to dietitian session (vs. 22 days in standard care)
90% increase in RD referrals without additional burden on clinical staff
For clinics, the model is cost neutral at minimum and can deliver a 2x return, tapping into revenue streams that are often left on the table. For patients, it is life-changing.
Scaling Through Systems
Emily and her team have launched Mother of Fact in four states and are on track to reach seven by the end of the year. Their newly introduced Maternal Nutrition Impact Estimator allows healthcare leaders to input their patient volumes and insurance breakdowns to see exactly how much value digital-first nutrition care could bring to their system – both in revenue and outcomes.
“Nutrition reimbursement is minute compared to surgery or procedures, so it’s not prioritized,” Emily notes. “But we’ve shown that our model is not just affordable, it’s profitable – and it saves lives.”
By prioritizing cultural congruence, Mother of Fact ensures care is equitable, inclusive, and trusted. That means building diverse clinical teams, designing with digital health equity in mind, and training AI models on datasets that reflect America’s changing demographics. “Working in Boston with Haitian Creole families, I realized that patients often want to see dietitians who share their background,” Emily says. “We need to build diversity into our teams and design care that meets families where they are.”
A Wildly Different Future
For Emily, optimism is grounded in both urgency and opportunity. “Maternal care has not really changed in 20 years,” she says. “At the same time, nutrition is finally being recognized as central to health. We need leaders in women’s health to step up as unbiased, evidence-based sources for families. That is what we are building Mother of Fact to be.”
At StartUp Health, we are enthusiastic about how Mother of Fact touches multiple health moonshots we champion, including women’s health, children’s health, food as medicine, and upstream prevention of diabetes and cardiometabolic conditions. With outcomes that show clinics can earn $3 in value for every $1 invested, Mother of Fact is proving that reimagining nutrition care is both lifesaving and sustainable. For health systems facing an OB/GYN shortage and expanding maternal care deserts, that is not just innovation, it is a necessity.
Contact Mother of Fact via email
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Published: Sep 16, 2025
By Nicole Kinsey
