As Published in Healthcare Business Today

By Peggy Bermel

Investing in women’s health initiatives is a win-win proposition. Not only does it help improve outcomes across populations, but it can also massively lift the global economy. Case in point: Women live longer than men on average, but they spend 25% more of their lives in poor health. Improving healthcare for women worldwide could boost the global economy by at least $1 trillion annually by 2040, according to the World Economic Forum and the McKinsey Health Institute.

The healthcare industry needs new solutions to close these gaps in women’s health that take into account women’s lived experience and clinical needs.

A Closer Look at the Gaps in Women’s Healthcare

Despite significant scientific and technological advancements in the past century, major gaps in women’s health remain across multiple dimensions. Women and minority groups were not required to be part of clinical trials until 1993, leading to their exclusion in much of scientific research. For many years, male physiology was considered the default and basis of most modern medicine, often to the detriment of outcomes for women.

This also carries over into innovation and investment. Women’s health receives a small fraction of the funding directed toward the healthcare industry – just 2%, according to a 2024 Deloitte analysis of Pitchbook data. Similarly, only about 1% of healthcare research and innovation is invested in female-specific conditions beyond oncology, according to a McKinsey analysis. Furthermore, women’s health companies are consistently valued lower than other health companies at the same stage – about 20% lower, per a recent SVB report.

Taken together, all these data points make it clear that the women’s health gap presents an opportunity for the healthcare industry to improve outcomes drastically. The aforementioned World Economic Forum/McKinsey Health Institute study found that the women’s health gap equates to 75 million years of life lost annually due to poor health or early death. Closing this gap would give the world’s 3.9 billion women an added seven healthy days a year, or roughly 500 days in a lifetime.

It’s important to note that women’s health is more than reproductive health – women’s health encompasses any discrepancy in women’s biology from that of men’s. Gaps are found across the women’s health spectrum, including mental health (stigma and accessibility), chronic disease (less aggressive treatment and disproportionate conditions like lupus and multiple sclerosis), and cancer screening (barriers to regular breast and cervical cancer screenings), to name a few.

Smartly designed digital health programs that address underserved areas of women’s health can help address these gaps. For this, organizations are turning to human-centered design, which aims to solve complex problems with a strong understanding of human experience.

Understanding Design Thinking: It’s All About Experience

Human-centered design, or design thinking, is particularly useful in healthcare, where traditional problem-solving approaches can sometimes overlook the human perspective. While strong systems and processes are essential for safe and high-quality healthcare, they cannot replace methods that aim to understand the real needs of patients, families, and caregivers.

At a high level, design thinking employs a semi-structured process to grasp lived experiences and encourage creative problem-solving for unmet needs. A common framework used in design thinking is the Double Diamond, which divides the problem-solving process into two main stages: one to discover and define the problem and another for developing, testing, and scaling solutions.

There are four distinct phases in the Double Diamond framework:

1. Discover: Conducting user research to gather insights.
2. Define: Clarifying and defining the problem based on research.
3. Develop: Ideating potential solutions.
4. Deliver: Testing and implementing the solutions.

In healthcare, the Mayo Clinic has used design thinking to improve doctor-patient interactions. The concept transcends industries, however — IKEA has become known for it in retail, Ford has leveraged it in automotive, Procter & Gamble has used it successfully in consumer-packaged goods, and the list goes on. Organizations that utilize design thinking seek innovative ways to improve the human (customer, driver, patient, etc.) experience.

Changing the Game with Smartly Designed Digital Health Programs

Using design thinking to center women’s experiences in the design of health solutions can help close the women’s health gap. Some examples of how these principles can be applied to digital health to create innovative improvements in women’s health include:

• Helping find information, community, and support. People are much more likely to seek the care they need when they know they’re not alone. Programs can include a community component where women can share their stories, experiences and solutions with each other. For example, PatientsLikeMe, one of the earliest digital health companies, created an online community space for patients to connect with others sharing their struggles, giving patients a sense of community and shared experience.

• Making it easier to take action. A symptom resulting in mild levels of discomfort may not be enough for some women to visit the doctor’s office, but they may Google their symptoms and perform some digital sleuthing. Digital programs should aim to meet women where they are—in this case, on the online platforms they prefer—to help them find ways to address their health and well-being. For example, an online symptom checker could partner with a care navigation platform to help women find care for their needs.

• Using the language that women use. Solera’s recent Women’s Health Case Study showed nuances in how women prefer to discuss healthcare. For example, 56% of those surveyed preferred the more useful and inclusive term “women’s health” versus “gynecological health” (26%) or “reproductive health” (16%). Using more descriptive and inclusive terms can help women feel more comfortable engaging with programs that can help.

• Addressing the root cause, not the symptom. Listening more carefully to women’s health needs can help identify lower-intervention solutions that tackle the root cause of a problem, rather than the symptom. For example, 59% of those surveyed said they’d rather do pelvic floor exercises than medicate for chronic pain. Digital health programs like Origin can connect women with virtual pelvic floor therapy, allowing them to resolve their problems in the comfort of their homes when they need it.  

• Addressing unmet needs Designing programs for underrepresented health issues can significantly close care gaps for women. For example, older breast pumps required women to sit tethered to a device for hours a day, when women were already strapped for time. The development of the hands-free breast pump allows women to be mobile while pumping, affording them more freedom and time back in their busy days.

How does this look in practice? In one example, a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at a major U.S. health system used human-centered design to address mothers who were dissatisfied with not meeting key breastfeeding goals after being discharged from the hospital. A series of interviews with NICU mothers, caregivers and providers uncovered a disconnect in the definition of “success” between providers and mothers. The interviews found that feeding at the breast was often initiated much later than desired by mothers, who wanted to bond with their babies sooner through breastfeeding.

Following a series of design-based ideation sessions and a six-month period testing prototype solution, the team landed on a plan to give nurses dedicated time each shift to help mothers with breastfeeding. The result was a statistically significant increase in rates of feeding at the breast.

Devising programs to address gaps in women’s care should be a holistic process that accounts for the entire lifespan, physiological differences, and women’s experiences. Stakeholders can design more effective initiatives by embracing design thinking principles to bring more empathy to digital health. In this way, we can start to close these gaps in the provision of, research on, and investment in women’s healthcare – and in doing so, boost the global economy by improving the health of women worldwide.

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Source: https://www.healthcarebusinesstoday.com/design-thinking-womens-health-gaps/