WOMEN’S HEALTH ROUNDTABLE

Where is women’s health today and what areas to focus on for greater impact? Bring your perspective to define the challenge to work on at Hack Healthcare 2024.

Our role at Hack Healthcare is to catalyse collaborative action across the healthcare ecosystem, building bridges to bring solutions to the most pressing problems in healthcare and make things happen. To understand which issues we should focus on, before each edition of Hack Healthcare we reach out to our network to take the temperature of the ecosystem – what are the big things garnering the attention of the movers and the shakers? For pharma companies, hospitals, patients organisations, governments, health care providers, tech companies of all sizes and all degrees of maturity?

Each year we see that while the everyday business of the ecosystem doesn’t evolve much, there are always new things happening. Besides buzzwords coming and going (and occasionally mutating), huge issues emerge, gain visibility and then momentum.

One of these huge emerging issues is women’s health. It’s not just just enormous, it is also complex, which makes it very hard to pin down.

On one hand, the new openness of discussion on previously taboo issues like menopause and endometriosis brings new attention to those from the public. On the other hand, new attention is being brought to implementing academic knowledge of conditions that affect both women and men into daily practice (the fact that heart attack symptoms differ for men and women is not as commonly known as it should be). 

And in general, there’s a lot of “conversation” about women’s health, but many women feel that a lot of it is just that, conversation, and that real action is lagging.  

Once we started digging and talking to our contacts across the ecosystem, selectively diving into media coverage and research, a wide variety of issues have come to our attention:

• While women’s life span in Belgium is longer than that of men by over 4 years, their “health span” is only 5 months longer.
• Women can face barriers to timely and accurate diagnosis and treatment across a long list of conditions.
• Knowledge of differences in symptoms of cardiovascular diseases is just the tip of the iceberg – Endocrinology, Neurobiology, autoimmune conditions, vaccine responses, metabolic disorders, viral and bacterial infections – the list goes on.
• Knowledge of menopause and its impact on women’s health is limited both among HCPs and the general population. Menopause in the workplace is a hugely under-explored topic in its own right.
• Research in women’s health tends to focus on diseases with high mortality, overlooking diseases leading to disability
• Inconsistent representation of women in clinical trials is still sometimes a fact (though this is improving rapidly); however, historically limited availability of sex-disaggreagated data still affects drug safety for women.
• Some mental health disorders (such as depression and anxiety) affect women disproportionately, partially due to biology and partially due to cultural norms and gender roles.
• Endometriosis is still a largely unknown condition, and its impact in the workplace is also underestimated / not taken into account by the employer daily practices.
• There are significant gender biases in how pain is perceived and treated (pain in female patients tends to be underestimated compared to male patients).

In addition to the above list, there are greater socio-economic and cultural issues that reduce women’s access to healthcare, sexual violence, and many more issues that impact women’s health that fall outside of the immediate scope of the healthcare ecosystem.

📢 We would love to address at least one of the problems above; to that end, we will bring one or more women’s health challenges to the next edition of Hack Healthcare on October 23 and 24.

💡 This leaves us with three questions:

1. What are the priority areas for action in Belgium today that would make an immediate difference for women’s health?
2. In which of these areas can progress be made through collaborative action of the kind that Hack Healthcare fosters?
3. Finally, which healthcare actors are ready to step into the ring and start making a difference?

To answer these questions we need your help.

We will share the summary of the findings publicly; participants will have access to a detailed review of the findings.

The Roundtable workshop is free to join.

Why would you want to be a part of it?

First, it will offer a unique multifaceted look at women’s health with the contributions of perspectives from all participants. And, it will give you an opportunity to shape (and then perhaps to drive) a Challenge on women’s health at Hack Healthcare 2024, connecting you to representatives of the entire ecosystem.

Want to join us? Apply here:

JOIN THE ROUNDTABLE WORKSHOP