Women make up half the population, but drive the majority of interactions with the healthcare system, according to Investing in Healthcare’s Power Users, an Ingeborg report. They schedule appointments, manage chronic conditions, track symptoms, and seek more preventive care than men—yet too often leave with fewer answers and worse outcomes. Their engagement is high, but their trust in the system is eroding.

That disconnect has opened the door for a new generation of companies and investors aiming to meet women where the system has repeatedly fallen short. “Women are the power users of healthcare—by spend, by frequency, by need,” says Mira Kaufman, investment associate at Ingeborg. “Yet their experiences still don’t shape how the system works.”

Women account for roughly 60% of U.S. healthcare spending—$2.1 trillion annually—and are 1.75 times more likely than men to seek primary care. Despite this engagement, women face longer diagnostic delays and higher rates of dismissal.

Women Drive Healthcare Use Across All Categories

In nearly every dimension of care—preventive visits, chronic disease management, urgent care, and digital tracking—women engage at higher rates than men, and are healthcare’s power users. They use routine and preventive care at 63% utilization, dominate 20 of 26 major condition categories, and have more frequent interactions across both in-person and virtual care. Kaufman notes that “women aren’t disengaged—they’re over-engaged.”

The issue isn’t effort. It’s the absence of solutions that match their needs.” Their over-engagement also has economic implications. Women make most household health decisions, exert influence across the whole healthcare economy, and adopt new tools at higher rates. Yet, innovation has historically lagged behind women’s demand, leaving them to navigate a system that still fails to reflect their biology or experiences.

The Healthcare System Wasn’t Built For Women

For decades, medical research and clinical trials followed a male-default model, with women excluded until 1993. Those omissions continue to affect care. Women wait longer for correct diagnoses across conditions such as autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disease, thyroid disease, and endometriosis. They experience 1.5 to 2 times more adverse drug reactions, a direct consequence of male-skewed safety data, and nearly one in four women reports being treated unfairly by a provider. These gaps are not theoretical; they shape every point of contact with the system and explain why so many women seek answers elsewhere when their concerns are minimized or dismissed.

The Trust Gap In Women’s Healthcare Keeps Growing

Trust in the U.S. healthcare system is declining for many groups, but the drop is steeper among women. They are more likely to feel unheard, to seek second opinions, and to rely on external tools—digital trackers, home tests, peer communities—to validate what they already know about their bodies. Kaufman sees this as a critical inflection point, saying there is “a difference between being heard and actually receiving care. Women have been asking for the bare minimum—to be believed. But belief doesn’t automatically lead to better outcomes.” That distinction—between recognition and resolution—is now driving a new era of health innovation.

The Innovation Filling The Gaps In Women’s Healthcare

Across the women’s health landscape, innovation is shifting from tools that merely explain symptoms to solutions that actually help women feel better.

Evvy And Precision Diagnostics

Evvy’s vaginal microbiome and UTI testing uses advanced sequencing to identify pathogens that standard tests often miss. Its approach reflects a broader trend: women turning to precision diagnostics when traditional pathways fail to provide answers.

Knownwell And Weight-Inclusive Care

Knownwell is rebuilding primary care for patients who have experienced weight stigma. Treating metabolic health as a clinical condition rather than a moral one exemplifies Kaufman’s argument that trust grows when a woman’s symptoms are taken seriously and her outcomes improve.

Trellis Health And Postpartum Early Detection

Trellis Health’s at-home postpartum lab panels show how cash-pay preventive diagnostics are emerging as an alternative to insurance bottlenecks, offering clarity during a time when misdiagnoses are common and consequences are significant.

Ema And AI Built For Women’s Health

Ema is building AI models grounded in women’s real-world symptom patterns, an essential counterweight to male-dominant medical datasets. By focusing on lived experience, Ema aims to prevent the automation of long-standing gender biases.

Winx Health And At-Home Access

Winx Health provides accessible at-home diagnostics and treatments, emergency contraception, and evidence-based education to close gaps in women’s healthcare and improve access nationwide. By meeting women where they are—at home, online, and often outside traditional office hours—Winx reflects a broader shift toward tools that provide women with timely answers and control, rather than waiting on a system that has long underprioritized their needs.

Igeborg Investments, Muse Capital, And Women-Led Investment Momentum

Muse Capital and, of course, Ingeborg Investment represent a growing cohort of women-led venture firms reshaping who gets funded in women’s health. “When we back female founders and fund managers, they back more women,” Kaufman says. “That creates a flywheel.”

AI’s Role In The Future Of Women’s Healthcare

AI is becoming the front door to care, from symptom triage to appointment routing to early interpretation of test results. But without representative training data, it risks amplifying the inequities women already face. Kaufman warns that “if we don’t correct the data now, AI will harden decades of inequity into code. Women already navigate more complex diagnostic journeys, and incomplete datasets could further lengthen them. Companies like Ema, which intentionally build models around women’s data, show how AI can support—not undermine—equitable outcomes.

Building For Women’s Healthcare Is Building For Everyone’s

Designing healthcare around women’s lived experience expands, rather than narrows, the opportunity for system-level improvement. The pain points women encounter first—slow diagnosis, fragmented data, poor care coordination, low personalization—are the same shortcomings that affect everyone. Solutions emerging from women’s health innovation deliver more precise diagnostics, more humane care models, stronger inputs for AI, and better outcomes across populations. Women have long been the power users of healthcare. The question now is whether the industry is ready to build for its power users and, in doing so, create a system that works better for everyone.