Our learnings: The Women's Health Innovation Summit 2023

4 minute read

The Women’s Health Innovation Summit brings together the leading organisations and businesses within the FemTech and women’s healthcare space. For its second year running, the summit provided an opportunity for industry leaders to come together to improve the quality of healthcare for women globally, and it was great to have our team in attendance.

Four women on a panel at the women's health innovation summit.

At KD we champion inclusive design, leading female centred innovation, design and product development with our XXEquals team. In attending this year’s summit, our team were provided the opportunity to connect with leaders within women’s healthcare, as well as speaking on a WHIS panel about the reality of women in clinical trials. Below, we share key findings from the summit, and what this means for the future of women’s healthcare.

Greater recognition that women’s health is much broader than fertility. While developments within fertility are still essential, it was great to see this broader focus being emphasised. The topics included: pregnancy, pelvic health, mental health, diagnosing multiple conditions including cancer, treatment of these conditions, highlighting the challenge of including women in clinical trials.

Financial cuts to women’s healthcare teams are on the rise. Despite the noise made by start ups, charities and third sector about the importance of funding women’s health, we heard from key pharma companies that funding had recently been withdrawn from their women’s health initiatives, and whole teams devoted to women’s health disbanded. This is undoubtedly a step backwards for the industry, yet we hope that steps forward can still be made.

There is still very little funding for women’s health. This includes no specific sectors named by the NIH (National Institute of Health), leading to researchers and developers to try to access other funds such as diabetes. There’s still work to be done to make these topics attractive enough for business to develop devices and drugs in this space and encourage the relevant partners to invest. While the data very clearly shows that women are under-represented in clinical trials, under-served by their healthcare providers, and ultimately have worse health outcomes than men, male dominated VC and big pharma are still demanding more evidence before they will invest.

Progress needs to be made in conditions that are more prevalent for women. Women’s health not only covers the conditions specific to women but also the conditions that are more prevalent for women, such as migraine and heart disease, this needs to be recognised.

PMS often masks more serious conditions. It’s common that symptoms of cancer are endured for long period of time as they are confused with other conditions such as PMS. Thankfully, a lot of noise has been made on breast cancer, which takes the majority of the funding in comparison to other cancers. Although, in stark contrast, cancers such as ovarian cancer take on average 9 months to diagnose with the size of tumour doubling every 4 months.

Traditional healthcare needs to pivot to accommodate for lifecycle changes. Women’s health isn’t just about disease, so much of the impact and symptoms are due to lifecycle throughout a women’s life. This means we need to challenge not just the products being developed for women but also the healthcare structures currently in place. The traditional methods of treating women are not addressing the large market and needs. For example, due to increased life expectancy, by 2050 40% of women will be living with menopause, yet currently, on average it takes 6 years and 7 doctor’s appointments to diagnose perimenopause. As well as this, the average woman experiences symptoms of menopause for 7.5 years and 50% of women experience vaginal dryness for life.

While there’s still a great deal of work to be done across the sector to address and to meet the needs of women, events such as the Women’s Health Innovation Summit provide an important space for the leading forces in the industry to address these needs and create much needed change within women’s health. We’re excited to see what progress will be made both industry wide and by our XXEquals team to create healthier outcomes for women and a better future for everyone.