The Future of (Women's) Health Is Here and it is the Future of Health.
WHIS was one of the first conferences to bring women’s health to the forefront in 2019 with less than 100 attendees back then. Fast forward 6 years to this past week with over 800. And it continues to evolve and shape the health ecosystem. There are already great posts summarizing the sessions, products, addition of payer and health system voices, and key messages from this year’s event, so this post focuses on what story WHIS exposed about where we’re going next.
This reflection is about the paradigm shift underway in healthcare and the critical inflection point in the health of women.
Care Outside the System
This year’s WHIS took place during the government shutdown, an ironic but relevant backdrop for many of the conversations, panels, and products at the summit. Beyond the last-day rush to make flights, the real story was the rise in health care options that no longer require an insurance card, prescription, or office visit.
Whether you embrace it or resist it, the truth is this: if you can imagine it, you can likely pay out of pocket for it. Scans, tests, tracking, and monitoring for a range of conditions are all available without ever intersecting with the traditional healthcare system.
There are two sides to this story. This shift brings power and autonomy to consumers, and opportunity to innovators. But it also exposes (versus creates) the fault lines of access. I talk about this in work I am publishing soon, Breaking the System: How Digital Innovators Shape the Future of Healthcare. The access issues that direct-to-consumer healthcare spotlights are similar to the issues of access that already exist in our traditional healthcare model.
The shutdown happening in parallel is a stark reminder of this tension. Affording healthcare premiums remains a national crisis. For many, it’s not about whether care is inside or outside the system, it’s about whether it’s accessible at all. These are not new issues and with a different lens, there is opportunity to solve some of these long-standing and seemingly intractable problems.
The Role and More Impactful Use of AI
Our panel ‘Building the Digital Infrastructure to Succeed in Women’s Digital Health’ revisited a theme I also wrote about after HLTH: AI is not innovation. It’s not a product. It’s infrastructure and a tool.
We’ve layered AI over nearly every aspect of healthcare often treating the technology itself as the innovation. But the real breakthroughs come from what AI enables: humanizing health delivery, accelerating diagnoses, reducing stigma, improving prevention, and closing critical data gaps. Yes, AI can be a companion tool to making health more human and more efficient.
To accomplish that founders must lead with what your product does for the end user and customer and the change it drives, regardless of the AI label. And for investors, the right question isn’t whether AI is used, but how it meaningfully enhances outcomes and advances the product’s true purpose.
Meanwhile, the bigger and more urgent questions remain around data privacy, security, and ownership.
One of my favorite moments from our technology panel was a question from the audience: “Who is building solutions that let patients own their data?”
Whoever gets that right and puts data in the hands of the people who create it will be the next unicorn.
Relevant to my first point that ever-more clinical health data are now captured outside traditional system, there are volumes of personal data being generated from clinical to wearable. This means our individual comprehensive health story exists in data silos that we regularly create and access external to the traditional model.
It has long been argued that patients shouldn’t have access to or ownership of raw health data because they “won’t know what it means.” In many instances, that is probably true. But these data can also identify patterns, illnesses, or conditions early so that we can deliver potentially lifesaving preventive care or early diagnosis. The question becomes not 'if' something uses AI, but rather 'how' does AI as infrastructure help to integrate, interpret, and connect data for users and connect with care providers, all in the context of data privacy, security, and ownership?
As a result, two untapped opportunities are emerging:
Data ownership: Creating tools that connect these silos and deliver the power for individuals to own and therefore control their information, and
Data interpretation: Establishing consumer facing services that help people make sense of what they see, consistent with the fundamental intent of preventive care.
The genie is not going back in the bottle, so the opportunity is in harnessing this information, integrating it, and helping to interpret what it means. AI can help, but the innovation is in the people and products that give individuals agency over their information. Transforming care from episodic to continuous and providing context to the vast amounts of health data in our hands creates potential to reduce cost, burden, and disease progression.
The Future of Health
How this all ties back to WHIS also connects to the role this summit plays in evolving the field: this isn’t just about women’s health anymore. It’s about the future of health.
In its early summits, WHIS brought visibility to funding gaps, research inequities, and the need for more products addressing female-specific conditions. This was followed by summits that celebrated the emerging market, and the financial opportunities of this million-, billion-, and now trillion-dollar market. At one of my first years attending WHIS, a panel speaker said, ‘I would like us to stop talking about women’s health because women’s health is health.’
This year we crossed that threshold – future WHIS summits can embrace and amplify why women’s health is health.
As our panel Moving from 'Women's Health to Changing the Health in Women Paradigm’ captured, it’s time to take the momentum and tell a different story – one that starts with product value, uses language that drives that value, and creates a broader lens in the market.
We heard it repeatedly throughout the week: 51% of the population is female, 100% of the population is created by women, and 80% of healthcare decisions are made by women. We also saw how far the reproductive health market has been maturing, from fertility to menopause. Female specific conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, and fibroids are making essential progress. Our stories are important, but our approach has evolved. And the conversation must expand.
We need to broaden the conversation to cradle-to-grave conditions that impact women differently including cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, autoimmune disorders, diabetes, hormonal health among others, all of which remain under-represented in research and are diagnosed and treated based on male biology and male treatment models, despite how they manifest in women.
One of the most understandable examples is cardiovascular disease. We have known for decades that women experience cardiovascular disease differently, that these differences are related to biologic differences in micro- versus macro-vascular structures, and that cases in women are more likely to be dismissed as a result of bias. We have known that although women have slightly higher risk of disease as they age, they are more likely to die from heart attacks because heart disease is not diagnosed or treated as a disease that affects women differently. This is not just a clinical gap; it's a critical data gap.
Because women were excluded from research from 1977 to 1993, we have had to rely on aggregated research, clinical, and claims data focused on male biology and disease patterns. Disaggregating data and defining diseases, diagnoses, and treatments by gender will help to understand how conditions from Alzheimer’s to urinary incontinence and everything in between differ. Understanding the differences help us improve care for 100% of the population.
Broadening the field beyond women specific and reproductive health is an economic imperative. It is regularly stated that women's health is a trillion dollar market, but the other side of that coin – when we don't disaggregate by gender to understand how to better diagnose and treat disease – is a trillion dollar loss to the economy.
Redefining the Game
As we close the chapter on WHIS 2025, I am excited for what lies ahead. There are opportunities to redefine how AI can be used as a tool to humanize and connect; to create channels for personal data to be interpreted safely, securely, and with ownership; and to broaden the health of women to encompass the complete health journey.
We are no longer fighting for women’s health to be seen as a category. We are defining it as the foundation for the future of health.