By Jessica Bateman, The Guardian | May 2, 2019
Health technology catering to women has covered fertility, periods, mental wellbeing and more. Now tech entrepreneurs are catering to the 13 million women in menopause.
When Lina Chan received care to help her conceive in her late 30s, she couldn’t help but wonder whether it might have been more beneficial to have received it earlier. “We only receive the care we need once we encounter a problem,” she explains. “If you think of the life changes women go through, all of them are fraught with taboo. They’re not openly discussed, and it leaves us unprepared.”
And of all these changes, the menopause remains the least discussed. While a wave of menstruation activism has begun breaking taboos around periods, the bodily changes women encounter in their 40s and 50s are still not talked about openly. A study by the British Menopause Society found 47% of menopausal women felt they couldn’t discuss their symptoms with their bosses or colleagues.
“The biggest problem is that there are very few menopause specialists and a lot of myths,” explains Chan. Although there are 13 million women in the UK either in menopause or perimenopause, clinics are scarce, with policy network Menopause UK finding just three to help 1.3 million women in London and two for 2.5 million in the north. A BJFM survey found 48% of GPs have had no training in menopause management.
It’s an issue that the femtech movement – tech created for and by women – is now turning its attention to. While most technology products for women’s health have focused on fertility, a wave of digital solutions are now popping up designed to help women understand and manage menopause symptoms. And the sector looks set to grow – Axa introduced a perimenopausal challenge in its 2018 Healthtech and You awards, in which Chan’s digital platform Adia was a finalist.
“We take a three-pronged approach,” says Chan, who will be expanding Adia into menopause care later this year. “We help women self-diagnose through a questionnaire rather than having to take a blood test, we connect them with specialists over chat, and they can access a wealth of educational information that’s all rooted in science.”
She is working with doctors from Imperial College and the NHS to develop the content, as well as nutritionists and mindfulness practitioners to provide a holistic approach to women’s health. “It’s about helping women gain a better understanding of their bodies – if you don’t understand it, you can’t get the right support for it,” she says.
Chan and other founders in the space are hoping that, as well as improving women’s quality of life, they can help change attitudes towards the menopause. “We celebrate other milestones, such as a girl’s first period, but there’s still an attitude that women are losing something when they enter menopause,” says Jill Angelo, CEO of Genneve, the first online clinic in the US for menopausal women.
“We see it as the start of the second phase of life,” she explains, adding that the 40s and 50s are often when women are thriving in their careers, starting businesses, and have more freedom thanks to their children being older. “When you look at all the momentum around women’s equality, such as pay and #MeToo, we have still done very little in terms of healthcare. If you think about the women coming into menopause now, they’re Gen X women – they’re a lot different to our mothers’ generation.”
Angelo and her co-founder, former Neutrogena executive Jacqueline Brandywynne, have aimed to create a “one-stop shop” for women experiencing menopause symptoms. Users can book video meetings with practitioners, apply for patient monitoring, purchase products that provide relief for their symptoms such as specially-developed lubricants, and also access free educational materials. “When we started the business we spoke to 1,500 women, and they all said to us: ‘Just start the conversation,’” recalls Angelo. “They all told us they had no idea what happen to them in this phase of life.”
In addition to normalising discussion of the menopause, Angelo hopes Genneve’s design and tone of voice can help change attitudes. “We’re evolving our branding to take a more bold, vibrant approach,” she explains. “It’s quite feminine at the moment, but we want to develop a bold voice.”
Maxine Mackintosh, founder of One HealthTech which promotes underrepresented groups in the healthtech industry, believes women’s healthcare has traditionally been neglected due to the innovation space being male-dominated – despite women making up 77% of NHS staff. “Although you don’t need to be experiencing the condition yourself, it definitely helps,” she explains, adding that women are also underrepresented in clinical trials and data sets, which can further exacerbate the problem.
Angelo believes there is potential for Genneve and the rest of the femtech movement to address this inequality by working together. “If we are collecting data across our applications, we can use that in a way that starts to close that gap around studying women’s health from a research perspective,” she says. “That’s a secondary focus area for most of us yet a very important one, because it’s such a gap in medicine today.”
Although tech startups are usually hesitant about sharing data, Angelo believes collaboration is the only way to help bring about true health equality. “All of us in this space need to work together to see how we can help women migrate through what we’re offering over their lifetimes,” she says. And Chan adds: “Women are demanding more. Healthcare is coming on the agenda, and I think we’re only going to be more vocal about it.”