April 2026 Amber Grant Awarded to Ayuda Health

We’re excited to announce the April $10,000 Amber Grant recipient. Congratulations to Marsha Haynes, founder of Ayuda Health.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Jama Hernandez sat down with Marsha for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Jama: Hi everyone. My name is Jama with WomensNet. We are excited to introduce to you our 2026 April grant recipients. So as an introduction, we have with us Marsha, founder of Ayuda Health- she is our Amber Grant winner. Thank you so much for being here today. We really appreciate it. And we’re looking forward to learning more about your business and to know what makes your business unique in your field. So to begin, can you please tell us about your business and a little bit about who or what inspired your business?

Marsha: I’m the founder of Ayuda Health. And it’s basically a company that develops digital health solutions for people living with multiple chronic diseases. As you know, when a person gets diagnosed with diabetes, they end up with cardiovascular disease or kidney disease, and they have to manage all of these diseases all at once. We want to create platforms where they can do this. I was inspired by my own father who was diagnosed with type two diabetes. I was able to teach him how to simplify his monitoring of his blood sugar, his diet, his therapeutic adherence, and he was able to reverse his type two diabetes- his doctor was baffled! Chronic disease runs in my family, I have an aunt in England who’s on 12 medications a day through multiple diagnoses and helped to advocate for her. I’ve also worked in the pharmaceutical industry for roughly 20 years. And the common complaint is that with physicians, once a patient leaves the office, they don’t see them for another 12 to 18 months. When they come back, their diseases are worse, their condition is worse. So we want to create a space for patients in between physician appointments, because we don’t know when they’re going to see the physician again to help manage their multiple conditions and to improve their overall outcomes. The name Ayuda Health, as you know, it’s Spanish for help, and it’s really the basis of this-helping patients help themselves. And that’s really what we want to do with this platform.

Jama: What a great tool to have, especially because there are so many questions that you have in between those visits and too much guesswork. So that’s pretty special! Can you please tell us what makes your business approach unique from other people that are building similar tools to navigate their health journeys?

Marsha: The Ayuda health platform is geared towards people who have multiple chronic diseases. The different thing about this is that it solves the four-app problem. With medication adherence, some people use applications for that, and then for each of the devices that you may have for your condition (glucose monitor for your diabetes or your blood pressure monitor for hypertension), each of these digital devices comes with their own platforms. We integrate it all together so that you can see what’s going on in the universe of you with the multiple conditions. We enable connection to multiple devices and enable the user to see how they’re doing. We have an AI algorithm to track when any of these vitals are out of range. You could also connect your smartwatch, track your activity, sleep and we also enable diet compliance too. Let’s say you follow plant-based, ketogenic or a Mediterranean diet. You could track your compliance by taking a photo of your meals and the AI algorithm will calculate the macros and the adherence to the diet plan. So this is all together in one platform where you could actually see your therapies, your vitals, and your diet, and see how all of them are having an impact on your overall outcomes. It also outputs a report for your care team. So oftentimes when you go to the doctor’s appointment, of course you’re going to have to take a blood test and they will interpret the blood tests, but now they have all of this additional data of what was done since the last visit to improve their clinical decision making. So I think that what we’re offering here is just to simplify what’s going on instead of separating and segregating your conditions from each other. We’ve heard good feedback so far, so we hope to help even more.

Jama: We’re very excited about this! Thank you so much for taking the time today. We really appreciate it. And congratulations.