Accessible, Affordable Pharmacy-led Menopause Service (APMS) powered by Vira Health

Vira is motivated to make lives happier, healthier and more productive for the 1bn women worldwide (13m UK) coping with menopause. 80%+ of women with menopause report symptoms that interfere with daily life and 50% say it has made work difficult or untenable, with 900k UK women quitting jobs annually. Symptoms include physical (hot flushes, weight gain, loss of libido) and psychological (mood swings, difficulty concentrating, depression, anxiety).

Menopause can have severe long-term health implications: issues affecting women in later life, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoporosis and dementia, can be triggered at menopause. Improving treatment for menopause is urgently needed.

Yet the current care model is broken, with <10% of UK women saying they are unhappy with the care they receive. To address this, Vira has created two digital products:

* Our first product, Stella, is a personalised menopause treatment and coaching app for women, and is already transforming symptom management. It enables women to access support -- individually or via B2B subscriptions made by their workplace -- including exercise and diets plans, information, online yoga classes, access to cognitive behaviour therapy, etc.

* Our second product, Stella+, is a clinical assessment tool for menopause, designed to support GPs and allied health professionals, including pharmacists, in making better decisions about prescriptions of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), and to optimise treatment review processes, with better identification of treatment ineffectiveness, side and adverse effects. Stella+ builds upon our Class IIa algorithms for prescribing HRT.

This project will co-develop a pharmacy-led menopause care service so that women across the UK initially, and then across the US, will be able to go to their local pharamacy to access: 1) easy, affordable high-quality menopause prescribing via Stella+, and 2) ongoing, scientifically validated holistic, psychological menopause support (digital and in-person - pharmacists) - via Stella.