Designing Health Tech When Trust Is the Product

Unmissables with Ariba Jahan

Designing Health Tech When Trust Is the Product | Ambreen Molitor

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Designing Health Tech When Trust Is the Product | Ambreen Molitor

Innovation under pressure, design as care, and what Planned Parenthood can teach us about building systems for real lives.

Ariba Jahan

Jun 17, 2025

Transcript

What does it take to build digital health products that center care, clarity, and trust?

In this episode, I talk with Ambreen Molitor, a product leader working at the intersection of reproductive health, equity, and digital access. At Planned Parenthood, where she served as National Director of Product Innovation, Ambreen helped launch and redesign award-winning tools like Roo, an AI-powered chatbot for teens, and Spot On, a bilingual birth control and cycle tracker that prioritized user trust before it became a tech talking point. Her work helped Planned Parenthood win Webbys, Effies, and the VIVE Techquity for Health Champion Award, while quietly reshaping how digital care shows up in people’s lives.

She strives to support users navigating trauma, surveillance, and stigma with empathy and precision. Now as a Principal PM at Zocdoc, she continues to build with a sharp eye on who health tech serves, and how.

We unpack how her team at Planned Parenthood shifted from building in-house to partnering with pre-seed startups, and what that evolution revealed about urgency, alignment, and power. Ambreen also walks us through a revealing experiment: testing LLMs against their own content to evaluate not just accuracy, but tone and trust. The results opened up deeper questions about emotional safety, care at scale, and what readiness actually means when AI enters the room.

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What we explore in this episode

What people still get wrong about nonprofit innovation
Why trust shapes product architecture in digital health
How Planned Parenthood designed for tone, clarity, and care
The real gap between LLM output and emotionally safe content
What vetting a startup partner looks like when values are at stake
Why tone isn’t a polish layer, it’s an equity decision
Building through legal gray zones, shifting policy, and urgent timelines
Why impact is a long game, but direction starts now

Follow Along

00:00 – Show Intro: Building tech vs. building trust

01:56 – Meet Ambreen Molitor

03:45 – How Planned Parenthood scaled innovation under constraint

06:00 – Roo and Spot On: Designing for clarity, care, and context

09:00 – Partnering with startups (and protecting values)

12:00 – Testing LLMs against real-world content

15:00 – Why tone is an equity issue in health tech

18:00 – Tech’s role in care: assistant, not provider

20:30 – Policy, urgency, and real-time scenario planning

23:30 – Closing reflections + unmissable signals

Update: Since recording the episode, 19 states have some form of abortion bans, 12 have total bans.

Some Takeaways

Trust isn’t a feature, it’s the product. In high-stakes health tech, design choices, from tone to interface, aren’t surface details. They’re how safety, dignity, and care become operational.
Innovation in nonprofits isn’t small. Planned Parenthood serves millions, with a digital audience rivaling Fortune 500s. Innovation here means building with constraint, clarity, and long-term equity in mind.
Tone is a design decision. When Planned Parenthood compared large language models to their own chatbot, Roo, the difference wasn’t only in accuracy, it was in emotional intelligence. Roo made users feel seen. The models didn’t.
LLMs aren’t ready to replace trusted care. Ambreen’s team tested real sex ed queries against major models and found 40–50% inaccuracy rates early on. Even now, accuracy alone isn’t the bar. The full user experience, bias, tone, and helpfulness still needs human oversight.
Simple > sterile. Roo’s most effective responses were short, emotionally intelligent, and inviting. When you’re building tools for people navigating stigma or fear, brevity in the right places builds trust.
Startups need vetting, too. Planned Parenthood’s innovation model evolved from in-house builds to co-developing with early-stage startups. But partnerships aren’t just about speed. They’re about shared purpose and real user impact.
The policy landscape shapes what’s possible. From tele-health expansion to abortion access tools, product strategy has to anticipate shifting laws. Innovation means scenario planning, often with the urgency of advocacy work.
Impact takes decades. Direction starts now. Planned Parenthood sets quarterly goals around leading indicators, knowing that long-term health outcomes will take years to shift. But without early signals, the future stays stuck in crisis mode.

Signals to watch

AI’s tone problem. As more health orgs adopt LLMs, few are auditing tone the way Planned Parenthood does. Who’s designing for empathy, not just precision?
Startups as public service partners. Watch how more nonprofits shift toward co-developing with startups, as mission-aligned collaborators.
Reproductive tech under scrutiny. From abortion pill tracking to privacy in period apps, look at how state-level legislation is reshaping what tech is allowed to do—and what it’s expected to prevent.
Designing for clinicians, too. More health tech tools are addressing the other side of the interface: the healthcare workers. Expect more product strategy focused on both patient and provider experience.
Care as infrastructure. From mutual aid tech to reproductive funding tools, more platforms are positioning care, as the core user journey.
Invisible UX in health tools. Watch how the best health tech experiences feel seamless not because they hide complexity, but because they humanize it.

What to try this week

Think about your product’s tone as seriously as you think about its utility.

Ask yourself: Would this response make someone feel informed or ashamed?
Review your chatbot, UX copy, or help center language for real-world accessibility, emotional resonance, and dignity.
Go beyond measuring for accuracy of information, measure emotional response. What emotions do your users feel when they first get this information? What emotions do they walk away with?
Run a tone tension test. Rewrite one UX moment three ways: more direct, more compassionate, more neutral and see how the experience shifts.
Ask your team: what’s our tone designed to do? Is it calming? Supportive? Authoritative? Have the conversation

Mentioned on this episode

Spot On – Planned Parenthood’s bilingual, inclusive birth control & period tracker
Roo – The AI-powered sex education chatbot launched in 2019
Autonomy – Startup helping patients get matched to federal/state/local abortion funding
VIVE Techquity for Health Champion Award – Award recognizing equity-first innovation in healthcare
StereoSet – A benchmark for measuring bias in language models
Frost & Sullivan’s Femtech Market Forecast – Femtech projected to hit $103B by 2030