Introducing Culturally Competent Healthcare with HUED

Female Founders Fund
Female Founders Fund
7 min readAug 10, 2021
Kimberly Wilson, Founder & CEO of HUED

Last September, Female Founders Fund brought on Entrepreneur in Residence, Kimberly Wilson, Founder and CEO of HUED. HUED is a healthcare engagement solution tailored to address the healthcare needs of Black and Latinx communities by connecting diverse patients with culturally competent healthcare providers to increase the quality of care.

It’s been our pleasure to work alongside Kimberly and support Hued’s mission over the last year. Today we are proud to announce HUED’s $1.6 million seed round led by Female Founders Fund, with participation from Serena Williams’ VC fund Serena Ventures, Black Founders Matter, Gingerbread Capital and angel investor and health-care leader Halle Tecco.

We recently sat down with Kimberly to hear about her professional experience prior to founding HUED, the importance of cultural competency in the healthcare industry, how she sees HUED changing the healthcare landscape, and more. Read the full interview below.

Kimberly, can you share a bit about your experiences working at the intersection of social justice, media and technology as a professor and media professional prior to founding HUED?

My career has been centered around service. I am passionate about serving communities of color — more specifically the Black community. This first occurred to me as a student at Howard University School of Law, where we were taught you are “either a social engineer or a parasite on society.” And then later, these words carried me into my professional career, where I served in roles at ESSENCE, TheGrio, The Root, Black Enterprise and as a professor at NYU and Howard University.

What has your experience been like working with FFF as our first ever Entrepreneur in Residence? What advice would you share with other founders looking for EIR openings?

Working with FFF as the first-ever Entrepreneur in Residence was life-changing, to say the least. We’re all very aware of the statistics for Black women founders, but as a reminder, it’s important to note that Black and Latinx women founders receive less than 1% of venture capital funding. This opportunity with FFF allowed me to immerse myself into the startup ecosystem in a way that often excludes people that look like me from building multi-million and billion companies. That’s why I hold so much respect for Female Founders Fund: their mission to champion and change the VC community by mentoring entrepreneurs like me — women — by sharing expertise, making connections and offering strategic advice has helped me to build HUED into a stronger, more viable business model and product.

What was your inspiration in founding HUED? What is the problem you are looking to solve?

Honestly, my inspiration came from a place of frustration. Frustration with the lack of access and opportunities for Black and Latinx communities — specifically when it comes down to something as simple as taking care of our health.

Unfortunately I had to learn this firsthand as a Black woman navigating the healthcare system, often feeling unseen and unheard. In 2017, I was diagnosed with uterine fibroids, and after being initially misdiagnosed, I later had my pain ignored and dismissed by 4 white male physicians. I didn’t receive the quality care I needed and deserved until being seen by a Black physician — someone who understood my physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.

How would you describe HUED? How does the platform work?

HUED is a healthcare engagement platform tailored to improving quality of care for Black and Latinx populations. By connecting patients to trusted providers and culturally informed healthcare services, HUED reduces barriers that these communities face due to fear, distrust, comfortability and lack of access to quality medical care. Patients are able to engage with our physician directory by searching for providers based on insurance provider, region and specialty; our digital curriculum trains healthcare workers on anti-racist practices, implicit bias and providing culturally competent care.

HUED has a mission of connecting BIPOC patients with culturally competent physicians of color. Why is this important? How do you define cultural competency?

It’s simple: when physicians understand the cultural backgrounds of their patients, they can engage patients more effectively and provide better care .Cultural competence is not just based on race, but also the social, cultural, and linguistic needs of patients. By learning to be more aware of their own unconscious bias and more responsive to the cultural beliefs of their patients, providers can rethink how best to care for patients and be prepared to meet their individual needs. This can lead to increased self-awareness and, over time, changed beliefs and attitudes that can translate into adequate and individualized health care.

What are the biggest barriers that prevent patients of color from getting access to quality care that they can trust? Where do you see an opportunity to break these barriers down and put trust back into the healthcare system?

Bias, stereotyping, prejudice and clinical uncertainty contribute to these disparities, which result in minority patients less likely than our white counterparts to be given appropriate care.

By providing access to culturally-competent healthcare providers, the platform seeks to reduce barriers that these communities face due to fear, distrust, comfortability and lack of access.

How do you think the COVID-19 pandemic helped expose racism as a public health crisis in America? How has the spotlight on care gaps throughout the pandemic impacted your fundraising experience/conversations with investors?

The coronavirus pandemic revealed deep-seated inequities in health care that have existed for generations. Where investors and other stakeholders were uninterested and unbothered by the work that HUED was doing, even just a year ago, there’s been a spotlight on healthcare that is helping us to validate a problem that we’ve sought to address well before this moment in time.

Did your observations of health care disparities throughout the pandemic influence your vision for the platform?

While we initially were solely focused on tackling racial disparities through our provider directory, after observations of health disparities throughout the pandemic, we realized this wasn’t enough. HUED’s concept of cultural competence is developed largely in response to the recognition that the need for change is dire — and during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the majority of populations disproportionately impacted were Black or Latinx, there’s no better time than now. Lack of cultural competency affects accurate diagnoses, pain assessment and treatment, adherence to treatment, proper record keeping, and proper reimbursement for services. All of these variables influence the patient-physician relationship and overall trust in the medical system.

These methods will assist in addressing the health disparities that are influenced by racism and eventually narrow the health disparity gap that exists between minority patients and our White counterparts.

What role do you see HUED playing in changing the healthcare landscape?

We believe our technology can be a coach to support lasting behavioral change within our communities, and in this we hope to disrupt the $385B digital health market. HUED’s community centered digital curriculum seeks to train and educate 50,000 physicians and healthcare professionals by 2023 in effort to improve communication and quality of care delivery for Black and Latino patients. This amount alone will have a lasting-effect on the healthcare landscape.

How are you thinking about building out the early team at HUED?

HUED is currently looking to hire the following full time roles to be a part of our founding team: Software Engineer, Operations Manager, a Head of Sales and a Head of Research & Development in order to further develop the product and successfully bring it to market. We are looking for team members who share our passion of making quality healthcare accessible for Black and Latinx communities.

For more information on our available openings, click here.

What is your long term vision for HUED?

Simply put: HUED connects Black and Latino populations with culturally-competent healthcare providers. But our company does much more than that: our multi-tiered approach helps organizations — and will continue to help organizations — dismantle structural and policy barriers that prevent these populations from accessing high quality and culturally competent healthcare. Our digital-centered training curriculum and provider directory is only one part of our larger equation for pushing the needle forward to decrease disparities in healthcare. This includes health literacy initiatives to educate communities of color on some of the most critical issues that are impacting our health as well as working with employer sponsored programs to increase incentives for communities of color to seek preventive health measures.

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Published in Female Founders Fund

News about female founders and women in VC from a seed-stage fund that invests in the exponential power of exceptional female talent.

Written by Female Founders Fund

An early-stage fund investing in the exponential power of exceptional female talent.