Like many women over 40, I’ve become fascinated by the longevity economy. I lift weights. I track my protein and fiber intake. Earlier this year, I signed up for Function Health and got an inordinate amount of lab work done.
One morning six months later, I woke up to lab results that revealed my LDL cholesterol had been cut in half. Three months on a cardiologist-prescribed low-dose statin, after years of elevated cholesterol and a scan that showed early plaque buildup in my leg arteries, the numbers had moved dramatically. It was, by any measure, good news.
The first person I told wasn’t my husband. It wasn’t my sister, who is a physician. It wasn’t my cardiologist.
The first thing I did was upload the results to Claude.
I have a “health and wellness” project set up there, where I keep years of lab work, referral notes, medical history, supplements, height, weight and exercise routines. When I got the results, my first instinct was to share them with an AI before I shared them with another human being. It felt wrong, it felt strange, but it also represented a lot about where women are turning to make sense of their and their family’s health.
The AI Health Brief
A few months before the cardiologist news, my PCP flagged elevated creatinine and sent me to a nephrologist. Instead of heading to the appointment with only my insurance card in hand, I uploaded three years of lab work from my One Medical history, attached the referral notes, and typed into Claude: “Create a brief for my upcoming nephrology appointment.”
What came back was a six-page document – context, medications, family history, longitudinal trends across the bloodwork, and five specific questions to ask the specialist. Things I would never have pulled out of my own labwork as relevant, with questions I never would have thought to raise on my own.
I printed it. I was proud of it. I walked into that appointment feeling unusually prepared in a way I’d never been before. I was ready for my doctor to be impressed.
The nephrologist glanced at the brief, said something kind about my organizational skills, and then looked at his own notes – which contained the exact same information. He’d pulled everything relevant before I walked in. He told me that my labs looked concerning on paper, but that my high-protein diet and exercise habits explained the numbers. “Let’s just keep an eye on it,” he said. Come back in a year.
Nothing about my appointment changed because I had the brief. The doctor did his job. My AI-generated document was thorough, accurate, and ultimately pointless.
I left wondering if I had simply arrived with a more sophisticated version of printing out a WebMD article in 2002.
The Physician Perspective
When I started interviewing physicians and clinical leaders for this piece, I expected them to push back and tell me how horrible AI was because patients were arriving to their appointments thinking they were now experts, and how people are replacing real life doctors with AI slop.
Instead, I got nothing more than a shrug.
“LLMs didn’t create this challenge,” said Dr. Rishi Khakhkhar, an emergency physician and Chief Medical Officer at Counsel Health, an AI-enabled, physician-supervised primary care company. “For decades, patients have had Google, Reddit, and other sources as pre-visit reading material. LLMs have made this more accessible and streamlined.”
Khakhkhar admitted that AI is actually making appointment prep more accurate.
But increased accuracy does not necessarily represent a transformation.
Khakhkhar described what he actually sees on the clinical side: patients arriving with sharper, more organized questions – sometimes with a working diagnosis already in hand, sometimes with a clearly LLM-edited summary of their own symptoms.
“The power dynamic has shifted,” he says. “Patients are coming in with much more information and reasoning than before. Counseling patients with a pre-existing point of view is a skill we’ll need to get better at as doctors.”
The framing of AI as a patient education upgrade, not a structural overhaul of how care is delivered and received, was consistent across nearly every conversation I had with clinicians. Which led me to a harder question: if the appointment itself isn’t changing, is anything?
Why Women Crave More Control Over Their Healthcare
While the framing of AI as “better Google” may be accurate, there’s more to the story for women and caregivers.
Women tend to be the primary healthcare decision makers for their families. They’re also the group most likely to be dismissed when they show up to medical appointments for themselves.
More than half of UK women report feeling their pain is not taken seriously by healthcare professionals. A 2019 University of Copenhagen study revealed that women are diagnosed later than men across more than 700 conditions, with an average of 4.5 years later for diabetes alone. Women were largely excluded from U.S. clinical trials until 1993, which means the reference ranges physicians still use to evaluate “normal” were built primarily on male bodies.
When a woman uploads her labs to an AI tool and asks what they mean, she’s trying to take control of her and her family’s health needs and also trying to fill in gaps where certain symptoms may have been dismissed by a healthcare provider.
“For too long, women have navigated their health with incomplete information,” said Dr. Tiffany Lester, Women’s Health Medical Director at Function Health. “Symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, or changes in mood are often attributed to stress, aging, or hormones. Without comprehensive testing, it’s difficult to understand what’s actually happening inside the body.”
Function’s model offers more than 160 lab tests per panel – compared with roughly 25 to 30 biomarkers measured in a typical annual physical. The additional data has surfaced things that routine care missed entirely.
The consequences of that gap are real. Dr. Lester told me about a patient named Aimee who had already beaten breast cancer once. She maintained a healthy lifestyle, kept up with every recommended screening, and had consistently normal labs. When something felt off, her oncologist told her she was fine. She went to Function’s Galleri® Multi-Cancer Test, which revealed a cancer signal her routine care had completely missed.
A cancer recurrence had spread to her liver, bones, and spine, but luckily she caught it in time to begin treatment immediately.
With more information, women feel better equipped to understand changes in their health earlier, ask more informed questions, and partner with their clinicians before small issues become larger ones.
The Rise in DTC and DIY Health
The market certainly sees an opportunity in AI powered healthcare. U.S. digital health startups raised $14.2 billion in 2025 – a 35% jump from the year before and the highest total since 2022.
Wearable device shipments hit 611 million units globally last year, with smart rings emerging as the breakout category.
The idea behind many of them is the same: annual checkups and fragmented care leave too many things potentially undetected for too long, and consumers, women in particular, are willing to pay to fill that gap themselves.
Some of that demand is being met by LLMs like Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT, the latter which launched ChatGPT Health earlier this year. It is meant to address the same issue – patient education and symptom/lifestyle management between doctor visits.
The website features a video showing how various patients are using the platform for health management, being careful to explain that users should approach it in conjunction with (not instead of) their regular doctor visits:
“Designed in close collaboration with physicians, ChatGPT Health helps people take a more active role in understanding and managing their health and wellness—while supporting, not replacing, care from clinicians.”
At the same time, a separate category of purpose-built platforms has emerged with a more specific argument: that the problem isn’t just access to information, it’s access to the right information, in the right context, with clinical expertise behind it.
That’s the promise behind companies like Function, as well as Maven Clinic, which follows women across life stages rather than treating each appointment as an isolated event. It’s the same for wearables like the Oura ring, which tracks data on sleep, stress, and cycle health between visits.
“There is a significant historical trust gap in women’s health,” added Dr. Chris Curry, Clinical Director of Women’s Health at Oura. “Many women have spent years being under-studied, dismissed, or forced to piece together answers on their own. That means new tools and technologies do not just have to be smart – they have to prove they are credible, responsible, and genuinely useful.”
Oura’s promise also includes hyperpersonalization.
“We are investing in women’s-health-specific experiences and models,” she continues, “Not just generic wellness tooling. A woman navigating birth control, perimenopause, fertility questions, or changing sleep and stress patterns should not have to translate a one-size-fits-all system for herself.”
When AI Leads Patients Down The Wrong Path
Jessica Randazza Pade, a women’s cognitive health advocate who has spent years working in neurotechnology, is appropriately skeptical about the promises of AI “transforming women’s health.”
“Women have spent decades being told confident, wrong things about their own bodies,” she says. “I’m wary of a technology that can do that at scale and make it feel authoritative.”
Pade recently had a hysterectomy. Before the surgery, she did what any informed, research-oriented person would do. She asked an AI what recovery would look like.
“Because of how I framed my questions,” she told me, “it happily told me what I wanted to hear – that I’d feel better in a couple of days. That’s true for some women. But for plenty of us, it takes weeks or even months. That harder truth never surfaced, not because the information doesn’t exist, but because of how I’d conditioned the tool to answer me.”
Pade works in neurotechnology – so she is someone uniquely positioned to navigate not only tech, but healthcare tech. Still she got the answer she was hoping for, not the one she needed to help her through her recovery.
Dr. Khakhkhar is also concerned about this risk.
“My biggest worry is a bias toward action, when often the most informative thing we can do in medicine is to observe,” he says. “A slightly elevated white blood cell count could indicate an active infection – or it could indicate nothing at all. If an otherwise healthy patient is feeling okay, the best thing to do is often to wait.”
Not All AI Is Created Equal
There’s a distinction between general-purpose AI used for health information and purpose-built, clinically supervised platforms designed around women’s specific gaps.
Kate Ryder, CEO and founder of Maven Clinic, has thought a lot about where general AI breaks down.
“AI is designed to answer questions you already have – not point out concerns, recognize patterns, or lead you to questions you didn’t even know you should be asking,” she told me. “Maven’s model is built around continuity – following members across life stages, proactively surfacing needs, connecting women to human clinicians available around the clock.”
“The patients who use AI best treat it like a really smart research assistant before seeing their doctor, rather than (using it as) a doctor itself,” Ryder said.
That distinction – research assistant, not doctor – is the one that came up in every interview as the baseline for responsible use. General-purpose AI can help you organize, prepare, and show up better. It cannot replace the physician who has clinical accountability for the actions they advise their patient to take.
For busy women straddling the “sandwich generation” – those who care for both their children and their aging parents, AI may help them save time. Feed labs into an LLM and see what the analysis is instead of reviewing them yourself or waiting for a doctor to call you back.
“The women who come to Maven are often in their 30s and 40s, standing in the true rush hour of life,” says Ryder. “Your career is cresting, you enter perimenopause, your kids still need you, and then your aging parents suddenly do too. Women become the default coordinators for all of it.”
But it’s no replacement for an actual health professional. And Ryder is clear that Maven’s platform is a combination of AI with human oversight.
“None of us play just one role in our lives,” she says. “And our ultimate vision is a connected platform that understands, anticipates, and helps you navigate all of them.”
The AI Healthcare Revolution is Overhyped
I went to write about how AI is transforming women’s health. My nephrologist appointment was supposed to be the triumphant lede – the moment a woman walked in prepared in a way the system never made possible before.
“The challenge is that our healthcare system wasn’t built for continuous interpretation of health data,” says Dr. Khakhkhar. “Most people only see their primary care physician once or twice a year, leaving long stretches where they’re left to interpret lab results, symptoms, and health information on their own. That gap is increasingly being filled by AI tools.”
He and other physicians are taking note as patients turn to AI to fill that gap.
“We see AI not as a replacement for primary care, but as a way to extend it,” he says. “By enabling more continuous, physician-supervised care between visits, patients have ongoing access to trusted clinical guidance instead of relying solely on annual checkups or navigating complex health decisions on their own.”
The AI healthcare revolution, if there is one, is not in the appointment itself. It’s in the 363 days around it: the 2am questions finally answered, the patterns finally named. It’s in the sense of control, the confidence gained by walking into an appointment already prepared, research in hand, questions ready.
Whether that changes outcomes remains to be seen. But for women who’ve spent years leaving appointments with more questions than answers, it’s a start.
