Beyond Reproductive Health: Why Women’s Health Has Outgrown Its Category
For years, the women’s health market has been boxed into five very narrow categories: contraception, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, menopause. Each stage of a woman’s life has been treated like individual lily pads in the reproductive health pond. Disconnected. Contained.
But like lily pads, reproductive health is connected beneath the surface: invisible, but powerful. Have you ever tried to pick up just one lily pad? And the pond itself is only a source, feeding into an entire ocean. That ocean is made up of all the elements of health including clinical, behavioral, social risks, aggregated across genders and demographics.
It matters that reproductive health was the category that finally put women’s health on the map after decades of being sidelined. It also matters that, in just over a decade, innovation in this space has dramatically expanded our understanding of hormones, genetics, biology, and physiology. These factors are highlighting how diseases differently, disproportionately, or exclusively affect women. This progress was essential.
But these data are telling a much bigger story.
They are part of a connected health journey across the entire life span that is shaped by clinical risk, behavioral health, social context, and access to care. Increasingly, the evidence shows that understanding health as it relates to women is, in fact, understanding health for everyone.
Reproductive health is critically important. But the reproductive years - roughly defined as ages 15 to 50 - are only a snapshot of the health conditions that affect women.
Based on average life expectancy in the US, reproductive health represents less than half of a woman’s life course; approximately 44%.
The mechanisms that influence reproductive health are not confined by reproductive years. They are active across the entire life course and shape cardiovascular, metabolic, neurological, immune, and mental health. Pregnancy-related conditions alone such as gestational diabetes or hypertensive disorders are established as early indicators of long-term risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. These trajectories begin far earlier than our traditional definitions of “women’s health” acknowledge.
Redefining the Pond
Innovation is disruption.
Reproductive health put women’s health on the map. That was step one. Rapid innovation created a multi-billion-dollar market. That was step two. Step three asks harder questions: Where is the white space? Where are the gaps we have not yet addressed?
Accelerating and amplifying care for diseases that affect women differently and disproportionately requires connecting dots across the entire healthcare continuum.
The next evolution of health led by women is not about more point solutions. It is about infrastructure: shared data, predictive models, and integration built around questions that cut across biology, genetics, genomics, neurology, and the full life span. These questions must account for clinical risk, behavioral health, and social determinants simultaneously.
When my company, Joyuus, was just a concept, this was the vision. If we could create and connect data in ways that reflect how conditions show up for women across the life course, we could expose gaps in research, diagnosis, and treatment. We could shorten the distance between risk identification and meaningful intervention.
Early conversations dismissed this as overly ambitious. So, we started with the white space. Postpartum became our point of entry: our proof point, not our boundary. We began with a lily pad in the pond, with the explicit goal of reaching the ocean.
Postpartum was the right proof point because it remains one of the most structurally overlooked, highest-risk, and highest-cost periods in a woman’s life. Mental health conditions affect roughly 1 in 5 women during the perinatal period. Hypertensive and metabolic complications in pregnancy are among the strongest predictors of future cardiovascular disease - the leading cause of death in women. Yet care during this period is fragmented, time-limited, and often disconnected from long-term follow-up. It is also defined as a discreet and isolated occurrence, with medical care ranging from 6 weeks to a year (in generous circumstances).
Many of the conditions women experience postpartum are not unique to this discreet period. They are the same conditions that appear across the life course, only intensified.
Postpartum conditions are manifestations of the same diseases that drive:
Women’s lifetime healthcare costs:
Workforce attrition
Disability
Caregiving burden
Late diagnosis and crisis-driven care
Postpartum is not a niche phase of care. It is one of the most powerful predictive windows in women’s health. The risks identified during this period map directly to the chronic diseases that drive morbidity, mortality, and cost over decades.
Joyuus was built with this understanding from the beginning. It is a predictive care platform designed to scale beyond a single episode of care, a single diagnosis category, or a single life stage. The work has never been about postpartum alone. It is about reshaping how health systems, employers, and innovators, and investors understand, engage, and support women across the lifespan.
That meant going vertically deeper and substantially broader. It meant building infrastructure that ties early risk identification to intervention, care coordination, outcomes, and cost. Clinical risk, behavioral health, social determinants, and context-aware data were foundational not add-ons. The platform was built on evidence and end-user needs, first and continuously. We didn’t call our first product final until we got it right, with depth, and evidence.
Differentiation Over Replication
The next phase of women’s health will not be defined by replication. It will be defined by differentiation.
2026 will accelerate a shift that is already underway: defining women’s health as an ecosystem, not a set of silos. Many of us across the health innovation ecosystem - entrepreneurs, investors, clinicians, researchers - are building the operating system for this next era.
What Joyuus is demonstrating is simple, and consequential: when risk is identified earlier, when data are integrated across domains, and when connection to care happens in real time, outcomes improve - not just after birth, but at every stage of the health journey.
The real disruption is not expanding the pond.
It is recognizing that the pond was never the point.