Doula Dilemma: Solving practice challenges
If you're a doula or service provider with expertise in serving pregnant and parenting people, you often find yourself following one of these challenging paths.
The Independent Provider
You're working independently and are known in your community. You love doing what you do, but you hustle—always behind on communication with clients, always hoping those due dates don't collide or that you don't need a backup for your backup. You have little control over your schedule, and taking time off can mean a real slowdown in your practice. Your clients are asking if you can take their insurance or process reimbursement claims, but you have no idea how to do this while also trying to catch up on emails, file taxes, and make referrals for clients in crisis.
The Growing Organization
You want to work in community, so you start an organization or form a collective. Soon you realize that both the providers who work with you and your clients expect more, but you're often building your practice on a patchwork of systems and are balancing capacity with growth—budgeting your time, managing overwhelm, and watching your finances as you onboard new providers/members, manage communication and scheduling, and handle complex needs every day.
Managing 5 providers and 100 clients a year is one thing, but how can you manage 500? Whether you're for-profit and trying to cover your salary with growth or a nonprofit wondering how to close funding gaps, you need to figure out how to scale—impact and growth—without burning out.
You are now the one who has to figure out insurance, reimbursements, and what happens if your organization misses opportunities. Your client feedback regarding care is great, but you lose clients if you can't respond quickly enough to all their needs, some of which are outside your scope. You admit you could be better at managing referral networks, but you don't get around to it. You might not be on-call for births anymore, but you're on call for everyone.
Or maybe you're considering working with one of the growing agencies or platforms that have the funding to figure all these things out, but you wonder if it's worth giving up the practice that you have proudly built.
Okkanti Provides an Alternative
We're the operating system for a collaborative approach to serving our communities with better maternal and infant care.
Our vision is to preserve the power of community and the small, "right-sized" practices that make up the fabric of our maternal health "gap-filling" ecosystem by delivering a smarter way to work, whether you're a solo provider or a growing organization.
We've built a platform that centers the care seeker—allowing them to have all their appointments across organizations in one place and providing a secure way to pay and communicate with their chosen support systems. Our innovation was designed to make whole-person care across cities, rural communities, and regions possible through multi-agency collaboration.
We know that the experts who are serving their communities in myriad ways are the real experts in designing better maternity care. That's why we went about solving how those experts could be connected not only to those needing care, but also to each other to create seamless care journeys and to opportunities from third-party payers.
Proven Impact
As we launched our pilot, we saw significant impacts on the organization that tested it:
Clients who met with their doula through the platform were 54% more likely to book with that provider
40% reduction in unbillable time managing communication
The organization captured $76,000 more in revenue in a single quarter
We're working with other organizations to continue validating these results.
Building for the Future
As we support your practice today, we're also building a collaboration platform where practices can generate referrals, establish trusted backup relationships, and collaboratively manage complex needs while staying within their scope of practice.
And we aim to do this without risk or upfront costs—with providers paying only as they receive benefit from the platform.
Meeting Growing Demand
Demand for your care and services—for whole-person models of care—is growing, but it's difficult to participate if your practice doesn't have the tools, operational structures, and connections needed.
We imagine a world where all pregnant people can access a doula, a mental health provider, a physical therapist, childcare to get to appointments, experts who can help them prevent the complications of pregnancy, and specialists who can identify postpartum complications or feeding challenges before they result in emergency room visits.
We envision a world where organizations thrive, providers are paid what they deserve, and professionals are able to focus on what they love, take care of themselves and each other, and can unplug—both at the end of the day and with real time off—without having to neglect the needs of their communities.
Join Us in Transforming Maternal Care
Okkanti isn't just a platform—it's a movement toward more sustainable, effective, and equitable maternal care delivery. We invite you to explore how our solutions can transform your practice, allowing you to focus on what matters most: providing exceptional care to the families who need you.