Leading OB/GYNs: Why Evvy’s At-Home Vaginal Microbiome Test is Revolutionary

We’re Dr. Craig Cohen and Dr. Diana Currie, two of the many OB/GYNs and researchers who are collaborating with Evvy to establish a new era in female health.

As board-certified doctors who have trained and practiced across leading institutions like Harvard, UCSF, and Cleveland Clinic, we have seen hundreds of patients with vaginal infections.

Here are three critical ways we think Evvy will improve both the patient and clinician experience:

1. Rethinking the status quo

Instead of ordering multiple swabs that look at the binary presence of individual pathogens, we can see everything that’s present and their relative abundance.

This enables us to look at the entire microbial community and decipher how the overall composition might be affecting symptoms and infections, as well as determine the best treatment pathway.

2. Promoting patient education & provider awareness

Evvy’s results educate patients in an engaging way through personalized, curated insights and reports, promoting more productive conversations between providers and patients during appointments.

3. Taking a proactive, preventative approach

Evvy is promoting proactive and preventative care for the vaginal microbiome. Like many things in women’s health, testing and treatment for vaginal health needs further investment and innovation to develop new, more effective approaches.

With Evvy, we can proactively follow up with patients remotely to see if and how potential treatments and suggestions impacted the vaginal microbiome.

Rethinking the Status Quo: The State of Vaginal Health Testing Today

From first-hand experience, we can tell you that the tests we have access to in clinics can be limited — most swabs only test for the binary presence of a few pathogens instead of looking at the overall composition of the vaginal microbiome.

For patients with recurrent yeast infections or bacterial vaginosis, this can trigger a months-long journey of searching for the right diagnosis and prognosis, experimenting with various swabs and treatments, too often with limited benefit. We empathize with how painfully frustrating this can be for our patients because it’s also frustrating for us as providers. We want better answers to give our patients.

The Evvy Vaginal Health Test can not only bring comprehensive information to anyone suffering with vaginal infections, but also to their providers.

Evvy isn’t replacing the physician / patient relationship — it’s enhancing it.

The new CDC STI Treatment Guidelines already support the use of point-of-care NAAT testing for bacterial vaginosis and we believe Evvy’s metagenomics-based approach is the next frontier.

With Evvy, we are able to see the relative abundance of all bacteria and fungi present in their vaginal microbiomes (and we can track them over time), providing us with a more comprehensive picture to guide conversations with our patients.

The Future is Shared Decision-Making: Why Patient Education and Provider Awareness Matters

We strongly believe that the future of healthcare will be built on shared decision-making between patients and their providers.

This requires empowering women and people with vaginas with better information about their own bodies. Evvy’s platform provides relevant education about what research has proven to date and what is still unknown — so they can actively advocate for themselves and participate in the decision making about their own health.

To do this effectively, Evvy collates research on possible interventions and relevant educational content, curated to each member and rated based on quality of the scientific evidence.

We also look forward to raising awareness among fellow providers on the evolving research on vaginal dysbiosis and its role in areas beyond vaginal health.

Reframing Care: From Reactive to Proactive & Preventative

Like many things in women’s health, testing and treatment for vaginal health needs further investment and innovation to develop new, more effective approaches.

Ensuring that vaginal health is managed proactively and preventatively is critically important since vaginal health affects more than just the vagina. Beyond symptoms and infections, the vaginal microbiome is related to so many aspects of female health, from STI acquisition to fertility to pregnancy to menopause.

Evvy is ensuring that a proactive, data-driven approach to vaginal health is prioritized for both patients and providers. In addition to providing more comprehensive results, the Evvy test creates an opportunity to close the loop remotely. By proactively doing at-home follow-up testing, we can see if the treatments or recommended changes impacted the microbiome in the way we expected.

We can also start to see if certain behaviors or treatments act as triggers for an individual, and how their symptoms and behaviors relate to the results. With this comprehensive data, we can have a far more informed and productive conversation about what to do in the future.

While equipping patients and providers with useful information at the individual level, Evvy is also accelerating our understanding of these complex conditions at scale and how they manifest in the real world over time.

With the collective insight on what interventions improve the microbiome (and don’t), we are giving anyone interested in improving their vaginal health a personalized approach to something that we’ve oversimplified and treated with antibiotics (often without success) for far too long.

Looking Ahead

For healthcare providers, Evvy is an exciting and important new tool in our toolkit that will help us provide the empathic, personalized, and proactive care that we strive to offer.

We look forward to a new future in vaginal health — one where we take a nuanced and personalized approach to understanding an individual’s vaginal microbiome; and one where we have new, innovative therapeutic approaches that will transform our ability to treat it.

We’re excited to be championing Evvy’s work to bring better data, renewed attention, and greater investment to understanding the vaginal microbiome. We look forward to educating providers and patients about the importance of the vaginal microbiome — and continuing to put women and people with vaginas at the center of their healthcare experiences.

Want to learn more or join the Evvy Provider Community? Visit evvy.com/provider or reach out to providers@evvy.com.