What's in a name?: Women's Health Innovation vs. FemTech
I have been searching for unicorns -- FemTech products that promise and deliver on evidence-based interventions that address female health needs. As I've been reviewing a large database I put together of companies that consider themselves "FemTech" and I am reminded that we really need to differentiate between "Women's Health Innovation" and "FemTech."
(c) Katie D. McMillan, MPH for Well Made Health, LLC
Examples of Women's Health Innovation are:
Consumer Product Goods, like absorbent menstrual undies, pleasure products, flushable pregnancy tests, and customized vitamins.
New medical devices and diagnostics to be used in clinical settings, such as breast scanners that could replace traditional mammography, or AI powered embryo selection tools.
Unique employer benefits, such as fertility benefit solutions.
Marketplaces: These are websites where consumers can see and compare a variety of different goods -- such as breast pumps -- and order which fits their needs.
New brick and mortar clinic and care models: for example, companies like Tia and Kindbody are creating less sterile, more integrated healthcare practices.
I define FemTech as a sector of digital health that includes mobile apps and devices to specifically address biologically female health needs.
Examples of FemTech are:
Telehealth: I put together a list of telehealth companies serving women's health needs. I consider telehealth a medium for care, not really an innovation in itself and definitely not an intervention. Telehealth products would not be unicorns.
Educational Platforms: Health information websites have long been under the umbrella of digital health, though I'd argue that they are simply internet information. There are many tagged as FemTech that educate people on things like different contraception methods, and many apps include some educational content section.
Health tracking apps: These types of apps are essentially digital calendars where you can log symptoms and other notes with the goal of generating a greater understanding of health trends. The classic example is a menstrual tracking app, but this has exampled to include lots of others like PCOS symptoms, menopause symptoms, cancer treatment symptoms, etc.
Connected Devices: These are electricity powered tools that can be in the form of a ring, a watch, a wrist tracker, a wand, a necklace, a blood pressure cuff, to collect biometrics, and are typically synced with a mobile phone all to make sense of the data and store it somewhere. This is an area of FemTech that seems promising as far as being a unicorn-- a device used in concert with education and training in order to achieve a measurable health improvement.
Digital Therapeutics: According to the Digital Therapeutics Alliance, "Digital therapeutics (DTx) deliver medical interventions directly to patients using evidence-based, clinically evaluated software to treat, manage, and prevent a broad spectrum of diseases and disorders." A few female health companies are listed on the Digital Therapeutics Alliance website. This is the most promising area for unicorns!
I'm educating you on all of these categories, because I have been sorting through over 400 companies that consider themselves FemTech, and I am working to make sense of which ones would actually meet our criteria for future investigation into the research supporting their claims. So far, I have identified about 50 companies out of 250+ that I've reviewed and I’ll dig into their clinical evidence.
Do you agree with my definitions of Women’s Health Innovation and FemTech?
