From Fragmentation to Flow: Unlocking the Power of Connected Women's Health

The past decade has seen a significant surge in attention and investment in women's health. The 2025 WHAM Investment report highlights a remarkable 300% growth in investments between 2018 and 2023, alongside 35 successful company exits in the past five years. This progress is a testament to the dedication of researchers, investors, founders, women's health advocates, and accelerators like Springboard Enterprises. Despite broader multifactorial headwinds, digital health offerings and technology-enabled innovations in this space continue to expand. However, many unmet needs persist. Some of these were prominently featured at the first Women's Health Day on the Hill, an event that underscored the critical role of public policy in amplifying the impact of both public and private investments. The Springboard Accenture reports, also summarized as part of the congressional briefing, further articulated these enduring challenges. Taking a ‘balcony view’, I observed the positive energy and commitment within the room just before that briefing. I was reminded of a reflection a founder recently shared with me about the strong sense of connectedness within the women's health startup community. This raises an important question: How can this connectedness be mirrored in Femtech offerings to women?

A few months ago, my attention was drawn to an online post about someone tracking their hormones with Proov, sleep and activity with ŌURA, and periods with Flo. It sparked both excitement and curiosity in me. My excitement, as a woman and women's health advocate, stemmed from the expanding options available. My curiosity, as a Physician Informaticist and consultant, centered on how this information integrates to serve the user both within and outside healthcare settings, and how it can contribute to research that addresses evidence gaps. The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) broadly defines Health Informatics as the science of using data, information, and knowledge to improve human health and healthcare delivery. My medical education was preceded by an interest in computer programming and information management. Discovering Health Informatics was a perfect match that set me on an expanded trajectory at the intersection of business, healthcare data and technology, bridging clinical and research needs with tech-enabled innovation, including emerging technologies like Generative AI. 

Addressing Fragmentation in Femtech: Key Opportunities

From my observation serving as health tech startup advisor and reviewing pitch decks as an angel investor, Femtech has inherited some of the challenges of the broader digital health space. One of these is point solution thinking and the fragmentation of data and services. This is evident both within individual startups and across companies. Symptoms of this fragmentation include:

• Lack of foundational data management plans, leading to data silos and underutilized information.
• Disconnected solutions (apps, platforms) that are not fully aligned with user needs and journeys.
• Limited user ownership and agency over their health data.
• Loss of valuable health data when startups fail or close, often requiring patients to overcome significant hurdles to recover their information.
• Poor integration of solutions with clinical systems, hindering healthcare professionals from using relevant data for decision-making (e.g., lack of integration with Personal Health Records or Electronic Health Records).
• Gaps in research and medical evidence, leading to the absence of standardized clinical and procedure codes for documenting observations or facilitating reimbursement.

Consider a maternal health example - digital health apps now support maternal health journeys, offering personalized and timely information, 24/7 multidisciplinary virtual care, and birth planning. These services are often impossible within typical 10-15-minute clinical appointments. These applications generate a wealth of operational and health data. However, critical questions arise:

• Is the data managed in compliance with regulations, including privacy?
• How is all that data stored securely?
• What data ownership or use agreements are in place with users?
• How easily can users access their information during and after use for example a subscription?
• How easily can relevant clinical information be retrieved and integrated with a user's main medical record?
• Beyond what users remember or print for in-person visits, could the comprehensive data better inform their care?

Building a Connected Health Ecosystem

How might we better connect the disparate systems where health information is often trapped, especially during the foundational build of a startup? Adopting key Informatics principles can offer a path forward:

Health Data Governance & Ethics

This is a crucial foundational pillar. It involves ensuring data privacy, security, and compliance with regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, and GINA. Implementing data governance best practices and frameworks is essential for health data ownership, use, access, sharing, and responsible use of AI in product development, deployment etc. Due to lack of health ecosystem experience, technical experience and resource constraint for fulltime experts, startups may inadvertently skip this crucial step with user trust and regulatory consequences. 

Data Standards & Interoperability

Founders, with expert guidance, can identify health-related datasets within their products and use standardized terminologies where possible (e.g., SNOMED CT, LOINC, ICD-10, RxNorm). Applying data exchange standards like HL7 and FHIR builds a strong foundation for interoperability across systems. It is also vital to identify and communicate gaps in current standards to relevant communities, initiating the process of expanding coding for unrepresented conditions or observations. Continuing with the maternal health example, the ONC/ASTP released an informational resource on Interoperability of Maternal Health Care Records in March 2024 to guide innovators.

User Journey or Clinical Workflow Integration

Leveraging user-centered design, it is critical to understand where a solution fits within a user's life: what precedes it, what associates with it, and what follows. This insight helps with integration with adjacent solutions and identifies opportunities for extension. Where applicable, understanding the clinical workflow around your product is also important. Depending on the solution, weigh the benefits of aligning with existing clinical workflows against the risks of disrupting them. Given that the Electronic Health Record (EHR) is central to healthcare, consider how your solution or its output integrates with EHRs.

Other crucial considerations include plans for evidence generation, analytics and insights, and change management. These elements are also foundational for creating a Learning Health System – for continuous improvement and innovation in health.

Conclusion

Fragmentation is a significant pain point in Femtech for both women and healthcare professionals. There's a clear opportunity to reshape the industry and create a more connected health experience for women, regardless of how many solutions become available. While focusing on a specific problem is essential and cost-effective for startups, especially in early stages and with limited funding, the inherent complexity of health (experience, clinical needs, and regulatory requirements etc.) indicates that point solutions without connection to the broader ecosystem can lead to frustration or even harm for patients/users in the long run.

No single company can meet every woman's end-to-end health needs. However, by adopting user-centered design and informatics principles, we can begin building a network of sustainable, personalized solutions that are durable, holistically benefit women, and enable longevity for the companies serving them.

What are your thoughts on ways to unlock the power of connection in women’s health? 

About Dr. Bilikis Oladimeji: 

Bilikis Jumoke Oladimeji MD, MMCi, CPHIMS is a visionary healthcare executive, an internationally trained physician informaticist, and a proven catalyst for innovation, with a track record of advancing the healthcare’s quintuple aims. She is the Founder/CEO of SheriBell Global LLC, empowering healthcare organizations and health tech ventures/startups to implement or optimize their clinical technology strategies, innovative care models and AI/ML adoption, in alignment with clinical, business and regulatory goals. Past employers include Optum/UHG, GSK, Duke Health, a Personalized Medicine Startup and Lagos University Teaching Hospital. She has been recognized as an inventor and for leading innovation in clinical research, clinical decision-making, healthcare models, AI adoption & governance, and digital health. She is a Certified Professional in Healthcare Information and Management Systems (CPHIMS), a co-author of multiple scientific and general publications and a global textbook on informatics. She also advises, invests in and supports startups and mentors the next generation of healthcare and informatics professionals, in the US and abroad. She has served as startup/hackathon judge and spoken on various stages including at major health/informatics conferences (AMIA, HIMSS, HFES), Women’s Health Innovation Summit (WHIS), ESSENCE Festival of Culture and at MIT Hacking Medicine. She has served on boards of non-profits and currently serves as Springboard Enterprises Council Member and Advisor, Steering Committee Member of Women’s Health Advocates and member of the WHAM Research Collaborative. She is an alumnus of Duke University Fuqua School of Business and University of Lagos, Nigeria. She is a lifelong learner with additional education from institutions like Oxford, Harvard and Stanford.