AMSTERDAM — The conversation around women’s health is expanding far beyond reproductive care, moving toward a holistic, life-course approach to tackle systemic diagnostic delays, data fragmentation, and biological biases across multiple therapeutic areas.

“Women’s health is getting more and more audience, more of a podium, in mainstream media and in scientific research,” Mare Lensvelt, MD, editor-in-chief at Dutch Health Hub in Utrecht, Netherlands, told Medscape Medical News.

“The conversation is slowly evolving,” agreed Thao Nguyen, CEO of Equal Care in Switzerland. “But we are still in the raising awareness phase, and we still need to bring more men into the conversation.”

At the HLTH Europe 2026 conference, clinical leaders, investors, and industry representatives gathered to address the persistent barriers women face within the healthcare ecosystem and to outline actionable, data-driven solutions.

“There’s a problem in health when science, patient experience, and public understanding are too far apart,” said Daniel Nagel, founder and CEO of F/A/Q The Better Health Group based in Berlin. “This is exactly when people get diagnosed too late, when it’s hard for them to express themselves, and when they really have challenges accessing the right care.”

The Clinical and Investment Gap 

The scale of this diagnostic gap spans various medical disciplines. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health conditions worldwide, and women are twice as likely as men to experience them in life. Additionally, 80% of rheumatic disease patients are women. Yet, the healthcare system routinely drops the ball on female-specific data. When a woman presents with a heart attack, she is twice as likely as a man to be misdiagnosed or dismissed; despite the fact that endometriosis is as prevalent as type 2 diabetes, patients routinely wait 5-10 years to receive a diagnosis, with surgery still the only way to definitively confirm the presence of the disease.

Despite these clear clinical needs, the financial infrastructure supporting female-focused healthcare remains disproportionately lean. “We’re coming from a very, very low base,” said Helen Gaffney, the principal of investments at Novo Holdings, in Copenhagen, Denmark. She said women’s health captures only about 6% of private healthcare investment. Historically, the bulk of this capital has clustered around a narrow selection of well-understood indications, such as breast cancer and fertility interventions.

Early-stage investors frequently express concern over a lack of late-stage venture capital to sustain a company’s lifecycle, while late-stage funds lament an insufficient pipeline of mature innovations. Breaking this chicken-and-egg cycle requires establishing robust therapeutic markets. The panel highlighted a significant demand signal to bridge this gap: Two of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies have recently entered the endometriosis pipeline, providing a powerful incentive for early-stage capital.

Optimizing Clinical Workflows and Diagnostics 

Amira Romani, senior vice president of global innovation and technology at Siemens Healthineers AG, outlined three distinct pillars for effective AI deployment:

• Assisting: driving workflow efficiency for standard clinical reads.
• Augmenting: overcoming historic clinical blind spots by identifying female-specific pathology patterns that traditional criteria overlook.
• Expanding: delivering specialist-level diagnostic capabilities to rural and underserved regions lacking direct access to expert care.

One tool increasingly integrated into clinical flow is ambient listening technology, which aims to alleviate the administrative burden. By capturing clinical summaries automatically, these tools allow physicians to focus directly on patients, improving rapport and building clinical trust while gathering necessary longitudinal data.

This clinical augmentation is particularly vital in cardiovascular medicine. While male cardiac events typically present as macrovascular blockages easily detectable via standard chest pain protocols, female cardiac pathology frequently manifests as coronary microvascular dysfunction within the smaller vessels surrounding the heart. Because human eyes looking strictly for main arterial blockages routinely miss these subtle dysfunctions, clinicians require augmenting AI to flag patterns that would otherwise be overlooked.

In many rural or underserved regions, the shortage of medical professionals leaves women with severely limited options for timely specialist evaluations. AI-driven diagnostic tools can be integrated directly into local clinics, placing expert-level screening capabilities into the hands of primary care providers, said Romani.

Multimodal and Longitudinal Data 

To develop targeted, non-hormonal therapeutics, tech-bio platforms require highly representative, diversified biological data. Petrina Kamya, PhD, the global head of AI platforms at Insilico Medicine in Montreal, said that machine learning algorithms have successfully condensed traditional drug discovery timelines from over four years down to just 13 months.

However, these models are entirely dependent on their training data. “If you’re missing out on over 50% of patients because the data used to train a model is not catering to them, it’s going to be a problem for your ROI and your patients,” Kamya warned.

Overcoming this data deficit requires a transition to multimodal, longitudinal data aggregation. By combining traditional medical imaging with wearable metrics and omics data, researchers can identify non-invasive biomarkers.

Novel algorithms are already utilizing existing mammography infrastructure to scan for breast arterial calcification — a strong indicator of microvascular hardening that escalates cardiovascular risk during perimenopause, said Romani. “The technology is there, we just need to use it,” she said.

Manuela Callari is a freelance science journalist specializing in human and planetary health. Her work has been published in The Medical Republic, Rare Disease Advisor, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, and others.