Who is behind this, what it is for, and what it is not.

My affiliations, first

The Missing Weeks is published by AEXTech Holdings as a value reference for maternal and infant health interventions: a sourced, graded model of what each intervention costs and saves, for any population, held to the same evidence bar for every intervention regardless of who sells it. AEXTech develops and maintains a portfolio of research analysis engines, publishing units, and other projects like, and different from, this.

I'm Alex Rogers, AEXTech's founder. I hold shares in Sera Prognostics, the maker of the PreTRM test on our timeline, bought privately and on the open market, and in 2019 I helped lead a $36 million financing of the company through Blue Ox Healthcare Partners, which still manages a vehicle holding Sera warrants, in which I have an interest. So I have a financial interest in Sera Prognostics itself, and in that test being used more widely. Sera's revenue from the test was under $750,000 over 2022 to 2025 (its filings); that is the size of the business my interest rides on. A Blue Ox partner held a seat on Sera's board while the company was private and left it at the 2021 IPO; I have never held a board or observer seat at Sera.

AEXTech has also prepared material for iMSO, a new company that plans to sell preterm-birth prevention programs that use this test to Medicaid plans. I expect to have a stake in it. Today I have no contract with it and no payment from it. AEXTech also builds a fuller version of the model behind this site, and it is a commercial product.

The test is scored on the same bar as everything else on the timeline, with its caveats stated in the same sentence, and the problem this site is about is much larger than any one company; the numbers below say how much larger. Sera Prognostics has no role in this site. It did not fund it, has not reviewed it, and had not seen it before publication. Parts of the timeline began as material AEXTech prepared for iMSO; iMSO did not fund this site and has no say over what it says.

If an affiliation changes, this paragraph changes, with the date. Last changed: 29 October 2026.

Why this site exists

Because the arithmetic of preterm birth is public, large, and almost never put in front of the people deciding how pregnancy care is paid for. The costs land in one hospital's budget in one year; the savings scatter across decades and across budgets that never see the invoice. In January 2027 the way prenatal care is billed changes, and every prenatal visit is coded on its own, with its own date. This site is the arithmetic, and the timeline, for that moment.

We think the honest version of the case is stronger than the promotional one. So the de-adopted intervention is on the sources page. The exploratory endpoints are labeled exploratory. The calculator shows its formula. Things that have not been shown to prevent preterm birth are not credited with preventing it, however much we would like them to.

Why I built this

our argument In 2019 I helped lead a $36 million investment in Sera Prognostics, the maker of the mid-pregnancy risk test on this timeline, to get that test into use. Since then the company has gone public, run two randomized trials, and negotiated with payers. In those seven years about 2.6 million babies were born preterm in the United States, carrying a lifetime cost of about $170 billion at the published average. The cheapest proven step, low-dose aspirin, still reaches fewer than half the women at high risk. The one drug approved to prevent a repeat preterm birth was withdrawn in 2023 when its confirmatory trial failed. Since the end of 2020, 139 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies or said they will. The preterm birth rate was 10.23% when I wrote the check and 10.41% last year. The evidence for the cheapest steps was in place before 2019; their use has barely moved. Seven years is long enough. This site is what I am doing about it. sources: the seven years

What this site is not

• Not medical advice. The windows on the timeline are population planning references drawn from published guidance and trial protocols. What applies to one pregnancy is a clinician's call.
• Not an actuarial model. The calculator is deliberately simple: public inputs, visible arithmetic, no risk stratification, no demographic weighting, no cost-by-week schedule. Those exist and they change the answers in particular cases. A payer pricing a contract should use them, in a review where every assumption can be challenged.
• Not a ranking of vendors. Interventions are graded on their evidence, not on who sells them or whether a payment code exists yet.
• Not affiliated with any medical society, government agency, or the March of Dimes. We cite them; we do not speak for them. We haven't even really spoken with them.

How to use it

• Advocates: the explainer and the calculator give the order of magnitude for your state, with sources you can hand to a staffer.
• Plans and state agencies: the timeline is the event list a 2027 claims feed can be read against. AEXTech builds a fuller version, with cost by gestational-age band, risk pathways and attribution by intervention; it is not on this site.
• Clinicians and researchers: the sources page lists every figure and the grade we gave it. Please tell us where we are wrong.
• Agents and developers: /llms.txt describes the site in plain text, and /api serves the same numbers as read-only JSON: the state data, the timeline, and the calculator, each with its sources, grades, caveats and this page's disclosure. Free, no key.

Contact and corrections

Write to info@themissingweeks.org. Corrections are made visibly, with the date, on the page they concern.