Investor brief · The Menopause Society

Composing with The Menopause Society, on their terms

The MSCP credential is the closest thing the field has to a quality signal for menopause care. Pause-Health.ai's strategy: serve MSCPs, route patients to MSCPs, and earn the partnership.

The landscape, as it actually is

What The Menopause Society owns

The MSCP credential (formerly NCMP under NAMS) — a competency examination that specifically tests menopause knowledge above and beyond a clinician's primary specialty. Their "Find a Menopause Practitioner" directory lists members and MSCPs who have opted in.

What they explicitly prohibit

The directory's terms forbid scraping, republishing, embedding for promotional purposes, or any unauthorized use. There is no public API and there is no public bulk MSCP roster. Several third-party "menopause specialist" directories exist; none claim Menopause Society affiliation.

What it means for Pause

We cannot — and will not — treat the directory as a data source. We can do three other things that are both legal and strategically stronger: refer patients to it, build a complementary provider graph from primary sources, and earn the partnership by serving MSCPs better than anyone else.

Four paths, sequenced

Path A — Official partnership

6–12 months

Negotiate a data-sharing agreement covering the MSCP directory and a co-branded MSCP-Verified badge on the Pause platform. Earned, not asked: opens after we walk in with MSCP users and outcomes data.

Strategic — the long-term win.

Path B — Build our own provider graph from primary sources

1 quarter

Reconstruct a menopause-likely provider graph from CMS NPPES (NPI Registry), state medical board licensure, and clinic-site service detection. No ToS exposure because we never touch the NAMS directory.

The actual moat we want to own.

Path C — Deep-link referral

Shipped today

When Pause recommends an external specialist consult, deep-link patients to The Menopause Society's own directory with the appropriate search mode selected. Zero legal risk, immediate patient value.

Right thing for the patient; right thing for The Menopause Society.

Path D — MSCP-as-user

Next quarter

Reserve Pause features for MSCP-credentialed clinicians (self-attested + verified at pilot enrollment). Publish quarterly outcomes by credential type. Makes the MSCP credential commercially more valuable — and accelerates Path A.

The Trojan horse into the partnership.

What Path C looks like in the prototype

When Pause routes a patient to a specialist consult and their network does not already include an MSCP, the prototype offers a deep link to The Menopause Society's own directory with the right search mode selected. Pause never fetches, embeds, or republishes the directory.

Sample ZIP search →Sample telehealth search →See it in the prototype →

Guardrails (non-negotiable)

We never scrape or republish their directory

The Menopause Society explicitly prohibits unauthorized use of the Find a Menopause Practitioner directory. Pause-Health.ai links patients to the directory on menopause.org; we do not fetch, parse, cache, or embed it.

We never claim affiliation we have not earned

Until a written partnership is in place, no Pause page, deck, or marketing surface uses the MSCP or Menopause Society marks in ways that imply endorsement. We describe the credential factually.

We never auto-submit on a patient's behalf

Pause deep-links route patients to the correct search mode (by-ZIP, by-state, by-country) but require the patient to confirm the search themselves on menopause.org. This is intentional and policy-aligned.

Partnership runway (Path A)

After our first 5 MSCP-credentialed pilot usersSend a courtesy briefing to The Menopause Society leadership: who's using Pause, what outcomes look like, what we're seeing in MSCP-vs-non-MSCP comparisons.
After our first peer-reviewed validation paperOffer to co-author or cross-reference. Submit the paper to Menopause (the Society's journal) when relevant.
At a NAMS / Menopause Society annual meetingSponsor a poster session on AI-assisted menopause decision support with anonymized MSCP cohort outcomes from Pause.
Once we have ARR and customer evidenceOpen the formal partnership conversation: directory data, MSCP-Verified badge, joint clinical evidence program.

Strategic rationale

Why MSCPs are the right beachheadThey have already self-selected as menopause-serious clinicians, they hold tested knowledge, and they are concentrated enough (~2,500 worldwide) to cover with a focused sales motion.
Why not just license the directoryWe don't have the leverage yet. Walking into that negotiation with MSCP users and outcomes data is dramatically stronger than walking in with a pitch deck.
Why build our own provider graph anywayEven with a Menopause Society partnership, MSCPs are a small subset of menopause-relevant providers. The full graph is a moat we want to own regardless of what Path A produces.
Why this earns trustOur public posture toward The Menopause Society is exactly what we'd want a partner to take toward us: refer patients to them, never scrape, claim nothing we haven't earned. CIOs and credentialing bodies pay attention to that pattern.

Read deeper

Provider graph (Path B)How we build a defensible menopause provider graph from NPPES + state board data, without touching the NAMS directory.
Customer selectionHow MSCP density influences our health-system ICP and territory model.
Digital strategyWhere credential-aware routing fits into the broader competitive moat.
About MSCP certification (menopause.org)The Menopause Society's own page about the credential.