What is the state of the telehealth maternity care market?
Growth forecasts for this category are easy to find and hard to use. What the category is made of, and who is buying, tells you more than the number.
Medically reviewed by Sina Haeri, MD, MHSA, maternal-fetal medicine physician.
The market is fragmented across medical practices, navigation services, software platforms and device vendors, with demand driven by the obstetric access gap, Medicaid maternal health policy, and employer benefit expansion. Published market-size figures vary widely depending on what is counted, so structure and buyer behaviour are more useful than the headline growth rate.
Demand is coming from three buyers with different problems
Payers are buying measure performance and member access. Employers are buying benefit differentiation and return-to-work outcomes. Hospitals are buying subspecialty coverage they cannot recruit. A vendor built for one of those buyers rarely serves the other two well.
The supply-side constraint is real and structural
Obstetric units have closed steadily and maternal-fetal medicine remains a small subspecialty concentrated in metropolitan centers. That is what creates the category. It is also why clinical capacity, rather than software, is the scarce input.
Policy is a larger driver here than in most digital health categories
Medicaid covers a large share of United States births, so state Medicaid policy, telehealth flexibilities and maternal health initiatives move this market directly. Coding and payment rules for obstetric services are also changing, which will affect how virtual visits are billed.
Treat market-size figures carefully
Published estimates differ by an order of magnitude depending on whether they count clinical services, software, devices, or all three, and whether they count only virtual-first providers. Read the methodology before using a number in a board deck.
Where Ouma fits
Ouma is a physician-led maternal-fetal medicine practice operating across all 50 states, with both virtual and in-person practices. Our own read on where the category is going is in the state of virtual maternity care report.
Related: State of virtual maternity care 2026 · How the Ouma platform works · About Ouma
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