Flo: Healthcare App Launch at ACOG

Accelerating Clinical Engagement for a Leading Health Platform

Client: Flo Health | Sector: Digital Health / Women's Health
Services: Messaging Architecture, Sales Enablement, Conference Strategy

Context

Flo is one of the world's most popular women's health apps, used by millions of people globally for menstrual cycle tracking, fertility planning, and pregnancy monitoring. The platform combines user-reported data with published clinical evidence and AI-driven health insights. It's backed by a growing body of research and clinical partnerships that underpin its credibility in women's health.

Having established consumer market leadership, Flo was ready to accelerate the next phase of its strategy: deepening engagement with the medical community. The platform already had genuine clinical utility — published research, validated algorithms, and partnerships with healthcare institutions. The ambition was to ensure that clinicians — obstetricians, gynaecologists, midwives, nurses, and primary care physicians — fully understood these capabilities and could confidently recommend the platform to patients.

Major US medical conferences, particularly ACOG (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists), represented a key opportunity to showcase Flo's clinical depth to healthcare professionals at scale.

The Challenge

Bridging the gap between consumer health technology and clinical adoption is one of the hardest challenges in digital health — and it's an industry-wide problem, not specific to any single company. Even when a platform has strong evidence and genuine clinical value, healthcare professionals apply a rigorous evaluation lens that's very different from consumer adoption.

The challenge for Flo was strategic and structural:

• Communicating clinical depth to a clinical audience: Flo had substantial clinical evidence and platform capabilities, but conference messaging needed to foreground these in language that resonated with healthcare professionals. Clinicians evaluate products through an evidence-based lens — they need to see clinical utility, validated outcomes, and workflow relevance before they'll recommend a platform to patients
• Creating meaningful engagement at scale: Medical conferences are high-volume, high-noise environments. Every exhibitor is competing for the same clinicians' attention. The opportunity was to design an engagement experience that went beyond standard booth interactions — something that demonstrated clinical relevance quickly and memorably, creating a foundation for deeper conversations
• Equipping the team for clinical conversations: Flo's commercial team had excellent product knowledge. The next step was ensuring they had structured clinical talking points, evidence-based conversation guides, and clear responses to the questions healthcare professionals typically ask when evaluating a new tool for clinical recommendation
• Building a scalable engagement model: The goal wasn't a single successful conference — it was a repeatable framework that Flo could deploy across multiple events, clinical specialities, and markets. Every element needed to be structured, measurable, and adaptable

The Approach

Clinical positioning framework. I developed a messaging architecture specifically designed for healthcare professional audiences. This meant grounding every element of Flo's conference narrative in published evidence and clinical utility — highlighting the platform's research base, validated algorithms, data capabilities, and clinical partnerships. The framework covered multiple clinician types (OB/GYN specialists, midwives, primary care) with audience-specific messaging that addressed their distinct priorities and decision-making criteria.

The positioning emphasised what clinicians care about most: how the platform supports clinical decision-making, what the evidence base looks like, how patient-reported data can complement clinical assessment, and how the platform integrates into existing healthcare workflows.

Interactive clinical experience. I designed a 90-second interactive diagnostic experience for the conference booth — a clinically-themed engagement tool that demonstrated Flo's clinical relevance in a format that healthcare professionals could experience first-hand. The experience was built around a real clinical scenario, inviting clinicians to engage actively rather than passively watching a demo.

This design was deliberate. Healthcare professionals are trained evaluators — they trust what they experience more than what they're told. A 90-second hands-on interaction that demonstrates clinical value is worth more than a 10-minute product presentation. The experience was quick enough to fit into a conference hallway walk, engaging enough to start a conversation, and clinical enough to demonstrate genuine utility.

Tiered engagement model. The conference strategy was designed as a structured funnel:

• Tier 1 — Attract: Booth design and positioning optimised to signal clinical depth and evidence-based credentials from the conference floor
• Tier 2 — Engage: The interactive diagnostic experience served as the core engagement mechanism, creating a natural conversation entry point
• Tier 3 — Convert: At the end of the interaction, clinicians were invited to access clinical resources, outcome data, and research materials — a call-to-action framed around professional value, not app downloads. Contact capture was integrated seamlessly into the experience flow

Sales team enablement. The commercial team received a comprehensive enablement package: structured clinical conversation guides, evidence-linked talking points for different clinician types, responses to common healthcare professional questions, and a clear engagement pathway from initial conversation through to follow-up. Every tool was designed for practical conference use — concise, evidence-based, and adaptable to different conversation lengths and clinician interests.

The Results

What Happened Next

The conference strategy established a scalable, repeatable framework for Flo's medical engagement programme. The messaging architecture developed for ACOG was subsequently adapted and rolled out across additional medical conferences and clinical specialities. The interactive diagnostic experience concept was refined based on ACOG data and expanded for different clinical audiences. The sales enablement toolkit became the foundation for all future medical conference preparation.

The broader impact extended beyond conferences. The clinical positioning framework informed Flo's wider B2B medical engagement strategy — shaping how the platform was presented to healthcare systems, clinical partners, research collaborators, and medical advisory boards. The evidence-led approach to clinician engagement became a core part of Flo's commercial strategy for the healthcare professional segment.

Key Insight

The challenge of clinical engagement in digital health is fundamentally a translation challenge. Healthcare platforms often have genuine clinical value — published evidence, validated capabilities, meaningful patient data. But the way that value is communicated to healthcare professionals needs to be structured around how clinicians actually evaluate tools for clinical recommendation: evidence quality, workflow relevance, patient outcomes, and peer endorsement.

Getting this right requires someone who understands both the clinical evaluation lens and the commercial engagement objective. That intersection — scientific credibility meeting commercial strategy — is where I work. Every digital health company navigating the transition from consumer platform to clinical tool faces some version of this challenge. The ones that succeed are the ones that invest in the translation, not just the technology.

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