How Eveline helped transform fertility consulting in Vietnam
The challenge
Vietnam has one of the fastest aging populations in Asia. The Vietnamese government has responded to this development by encouraging its citizens to get married by 30 and have two babies by 35. Making that happen already turns out to be very challenging for many Vietnamese couples given a labor market that suffers from low salaries and high unemployment.
To make matters worse, many people in Vietnam lack essential fertility knowledge. The limited availability of general practitioners makes it hard for advice-seeking couples to get appointments, especially if they live in the rural parts of Vietnam.
The few fertility professionals that are available mostly focus on more advanced fertility treatments like IUI and IVF. Thus, patients seeking more basic fertility advice are getting left out and are unlikely to receive suitable diagnostic treatments.
The innovators and their solution
Vietnamese healthcare distributor TMSC set out to change that. The founders, married couple Van Truong and Tran Hung, realized there was significant potential for innovation in the Vietnamese healthcare space when they attended a keynote speech by iXensor’s co-founder and Chief Medical Officer Jerry Chen in Taiwan.
They decided to build comprehensive fertility advice resources online to educate and empower Vietnamese couples on how to conceive best and do so naturally.
In addition,they introduced an entirely free 24/7 hotline that answers all kinds of fertility-related questions their audience might have, including lifestyle, cultural or familial issues.
The hotline is staffed with experienced nurses that are able to interpret blood tests and ultrasound images amongst many other things. Thanks to their empathetic and knowledgeable service, TMSC has generated a significant amount of word of mouth amongst their customers and even got invited to hold workshops for the Vietnamese Ministry of Health to educate high school students in Women’s Health topics.
On top of their generous free counselling services, TMSC started offering a carefully selected range of innovative fertility-related products such as sperm tests or hormone tests to their audience.
One of these hormone tests, and a key contributor to TMSC’s success, has been iXensor’s Eveline Digital Ovulation Predictor Kit (OPK).
Eveline’s OPK consists of ovulation test strips, an app and a little scanner that gets mounted on the front cam of the user’s smartphone. The camera then analyzes the tests the user conducted with very high accuracy and reveals her current fertility status (low/high/peak) via the Eveline app. On top of that, the app uses AI to predict up to 7 fertile days per cycle and reminds the users when to test again, releasing her from the burden of tedious planning and excessive testing that comes with traditional ovulation tests.
Eveline has helped numerous TMSC’s customers to better understand their own fertility and guided them through the challenging trying-to-conceive (TTC) period. Especially the semi-quantitative nature of the test that allows to better interpret the luteinizing hormone (LH) surge as well as the powerful AI ovulation predictor feature were found particularly useful by many couples.
An impressive 80% of the patients that TMSC has consulted successfully got pregnant without having to make use of expensive fertility treatments such as IVF.
Over 70% of these couples used Eveline’s OPK in order to make their dream of having a baby come true.
“It is difficult but we are proud to say that we did it in Vietnam: We help Vietnamese know over 80% of couples can conceive naturally once they have the proper fertility knowledge and use the right tools to boost their fertility. Eveline is the most effective tool we share with our customers.“ (Van Truong, CEO TMSC)
Against this background, it comes as no surprise that TMSC has been able to increase its sales revenue of Eveline OPKs by 900% within 1.5 years of collaboration. To keep up with the rapid growth, TMSC even had to quintuple its headcount.
Outlook
iXensor has recently introduced its new Eveline.Care service that effectively turns the Eveline OPK into a telehealth-enabled fertility monitoring system.
Eveline.Care combines Eveline’s OPK with a back-end system that enables fertility professionals to seamlessly access their patients' recorded ovulation test data and symptoms. This allows doctors to remotely monitor a patient’s fertility condition in real-time and provide comprehensive consultation to help women conceive faster from the safety of their homes.
Eveline.Care also enables fertility consultants to help women suffering from irregular periods and PCOS by facilitating the diagnosis through the precise LH level data and the pattern chart of LH and BBT that is recorded in the backend. This allows patients to manage their condition better and ultimately improve their chances of conceiving.
TMSC has started using Eveline.Care in order to further minimize the communication gap with their customers and provide even more personalized, precise fertility consulting services. Eveline.Care enables their consultants to have a more detailed understanding of the patients' tracked symptoms and thereby offer instant remote care to better support women in TTC.
