Winner of the Femtech World AI Innovation of the Year Award 2025, EMA, is aiming to lead the way in harnessing AI to improve women’s health outcomes. Stephanie Price speaks to CEO and founder Amanda Ducach, and co-founder Karishma Patel, to find out more.

Built on over 10 million women’s health data points, EMA is an ‘application programming interface’ (API) that enables businesses to offer enhanced support and care to female customers.

Originally starting out as a health customer tool that connected women in local areas, EMA has now evolved to offer more services, integrating AI for a more personalised healthcare experience.

As the first agentic AI for women’s health that utilises physicians and wellness professionals, the API has been designed to support women’s entire healthcare journey, including through fertility, post-partum and menopause. 

EMA is now rapidly improving access to healthcare and empowering women to take control of their health, securing over US$1m in contracts in just six months.

Supporting women’s health through AI

Amanda Ducach, CEO and founder of EMA says that with a trained core brain and two interfaces – one for users and one for business – the API can be embedded into an existing product or can build something new.

“Companies can build their AI on top of EMA instead of building it on top of a large language model (LLM),” says Ducach. 

“The beautiful thing about EMA is that businesses do not have to build the AI themselves, we do most of the work, and they just help us through the process.

“Companies leverage EMA’s AI for various reasons, but they all circulate around the same four capabilities that EMA is able to execute for them.”

These include personalised health recommendations that Duache explains covers three pillars; health recommendations; clinical support and assessments; and, care navigation and scheduling.

Under the health recommendations pillar, EMA can support education such as understanding symptoms, product and service recommendations such as finding the right diagnostic test, or medical adherence such as alerts and reminders. 

The clinical support and assessments pillar can facilitate clinically validated assessments, such as depression assessments, for example, support personalised care plans, and help to flag high risk issues.

Finally, EMA’s care navigation pillar can support clinician booking workflows, tailored navigation and helping customers understand insurance coverage and HEDIS measure tracking.

Utilising the API are groups of physicians, diagnostic companies, pharmaceutical companies and tech enabled services, and, so far, EMA is partnered with the likes of Stanford University, Hoover Institution, Patients Like Me, Willow, MyUTI, Embr Wave and more – supporting a number of startups and enterprises.

Co-founder Karishma Patel explains that the EMA team works closely with the clients to find the best solution and customisation for the front end of the business’s product.  

“The clients can lean on us as AI experts – we help them get started and understand the foundational principles behind good design and usability for AI, so we offer that support throughout the process,” says Patel.

Knowledge built by clinical experts

Importantly, Ducach explains that EMA’s knowledge is built using clinical guidance and industry experts, integrating physicians and wellness professionals into the knowledge building to ensure accurate, up to date health information and advice.

“EMA was actually built from the infrastructure perspective of the AI, which is typically a knowledge graph – like a big brain. We don’t use large language models for knowledge,” says Ducach.

“We do everything from clinical guidelines, working with some of the best in the industry to help us come up with how EMA’s knowledge works and what that actual knowledge is within the brain.

“The actual knowledge started off of our own data set from the original health consumer tool. We had over 10 million data points of data of women talking about their health to physicians and to each other.”

As clinical guidance, medical research and legal regulations around different medicines or procedures are constantly changing, EMA ensures its knowledge base is consistently updated to reflect these changes.

“We’ve spent the last six years building out a knowledge graph with ethical guidelines, clinical efficacy guidelines and knowledge guidelines,” says Ducach. 

“It changes the entire way that EMA is built.”

Embracing AI for good

As winners of the Femtech World AI Innovation of the Year Award 2025 Ducach says she is happy to see the recognition of AI in women’s health and that EMA promotes ethics in AI, building EMA within an ethical framework.

“It is exciting to see that the world cares about AI in women’s health,” says Ducach.

“I have been doing this for a long time, and we used to avoid using the word AI, because it would actually cause confusion. I’m so happy to see that the industry is starting to embrace it.

“The rules really matter – things like clinical efficacy, evidence-based quality assurance, standards, ethical framework. So, we are very cautious of the ethics behind the AI and we build AI for good.”

Ducach says that EMA has had over 15 million interactions since it launched, that eight out of 10 women said they prefer EMA to querying with Google about their health, and that 27 per cent of one client’s users reported reduced anxiety.

Ducach says: “We’re starting to see really incredible projects happen with AI and women’s health – that can really change the fabric of how women get healthier and how they support their family’s health.”

Patel adds: “For so long, we’ve been working a little bit in the shadows of what we do because people had no idea what AI was and were terrified of what AI. Where we are now – people are embracing it.

“We are very excited about the possibility of that and we are thinking of AI as a solution to help people, which was always the goal. We’re really here to harness AI for good. So it’s exciting to see the recognition now.”

The Femtech World AI Innovation of the Year Award 2025 is sponsored by SiS. See the full list of winners here.