Cover image of the FemHealth Insights article on femtech trends, highlighting key market intelligence and growth opportunities in the women's health technology sector.

Written by Amy Keenan, 2024 FemHealth Fellow, FemHealth Insights

About HLTH:

HLTH is the leading platform for Global Health Innovation, connecting the healthcare ecosystem through global events, inspirational content, and impact-driven initiatives. HLTH Europe 2024, which took place in Amsterdam from 17-20 June, united Europe's top health minds from 50+ countries. It combined the best of US events with European health market needs to drive change and improve outcomes across the continent. Led by an expert local team, it aimed to catalyze innovation in the European health ecosystem, connecting over 3500 attendees and health leaders across providers, payers, government, pharma, startups, investors, and health tech. Dr. Brittany Barreto has spoken at the Las Vegas events over the past few years and was invited to attend and host a booth at the first-ever HLTH Europe event.

Last month, we had the incredible opportunity to attend the HLTH Europe conference in Amsterdam, a four-day event brimming with insights, connections, and innovations. The agenda was packed, and the atmosphere was electric as we mingled with a warm community of leaders and innovators. Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, founders, and global health and patient care leaders shared their visions and breakthroughs. A new and very welcome addition this year at the very heart of the conference was the Women’s Health Hub, where keynote speeches, panel discussions, and pitches on FemTech showcased groundbreaking innovations inspired by the unique challenges in women’s health. In the current healthcare landscape, women encounter several healthcare inequalities, including insufficient funding and research for female-specific diseases, as well as medical products primarily tailored to male biology. This disparity in care provision within the healthcare system often leads women to feel marginalized and lacking adequate support. By providing a centre stage at the conference, HLTH really showed their commitment to advancing the conversation.

Diving in:

Keynote speakers and panel discussions provided impressive takeaways on investment and funding in women’s health. I wanted to highlight a few of the discussions in more detail:

On Day Zero, Kearney and the [w]Health community ran an ideation session, ‘Redesigning healthcare with women in mind’ with MSD, Essity, UCB, Novo Holdings, and the Women’s Brain Foundation. The room was buzzing with over 80 participants collaborating with global healthcare experts to develop solutions for improving women's health in reproductive health, cancer, brain health, immunology, and investment enablers. Participants joined hackathons and breakout groups to shape breakthrough ideas with peers from around the world. Dr. Antonella Santuccione Chanda, the pro-bono CEO of the Women’s Brain Foundation, led the challenge on how to integrate sex and gender considerations to improve prevention, timely diagnosis, and ongoing care of Alzheimer’s Disease, where it’s noted that two-thirds of AD patients are women - ‘women don’t deserve this majority’. FemHealth Fellow Amy Keenan participated in this stream; the team proposed a Brain Check initiative to drive up awareness of both patients and healthcare professionals and gather more data from women and females to progress the understanding of sex and gender differences in the disease progression.

Day 1:

Day 1 saw Paula Bellostas Muguerza - Global Lead Healthcare & Life Sciences, Kearney facilitating the panel discussion, ‘The future of health is female’. Featuring Rachel Byrne - Executive Director, Cerebral Palsy Foundation, Dame Lesley Regan - Professor of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Imperial College London, Astrid Meisner - Regional Business Unit Leader, Philips and Annie Theriault - Managing Partner, Cross-Border Impact Ventures.

Dame Lesley Regan, appointed as the UK Government’s first-ever Women’s Health Ambassador for England, shared:

‘I think it’s fantastic that industry and FemTech and corporates are getting behind this. But I don’t want us to fall into the next trap - we’re all talking about doing things to women and girls. So I think what we have got to do is examine why things have gone so very badly wrong. Because it’s not for lack of women - we are 51% of the population and most of us have a voice! I think women’s health is very simple. If you think of women and girls on a life course, we know that every decade of their life, their health, and most particularly their education in that decade improves or disadvantages their health in the next decade. And disadvantages accumulate. It starts in utero and accumulates throughout life. So it’s not complicated if you think about it in a different way. We’ve all been talking about maternity. I came out of medical school in 1980; women weren’t seen after the age of 50 because they were post-reproductive. It’s only been in the last few years with the help of some very important and prolific celebrities that we’ve got menopause talked about. And that’s an extraordinary thing because it’s such an inevitability in women’s lives. Until very recently- and I’m talking globally here - all of our politicians view women as maternities. Maternity is in fact a very small part of a woman’s life - I know it’s very important, and I adore my girls and wouldn’t swap that for anything. But even if you’ve had three or four children, most of the women - and men with women in their lives who have children - will not have been pregnant for very long. And yet systematically we have ignored all the rest of this life course. I’ve still got an actuarial life span of 80+, and my twin daughters who are 30 now, have an actuarial life span of 100.’

Photo of community engagement initiatives led by FemHealth Insights, such as active discussions in the FemHealth Insights Slack forum or women's health conferences. — Pictured: Dr Barreto with Dame Lesley Regan from the NHS, UK. The two work together as Advisory Board Members for Network of Excellence in Women’s Health at the Imperial College London.

With FemHealth Insights sponsoring the menstrual products in the bathrooms (read here for the fascinating back story!), we had our very own booth. The booth was buzzing as Dr. Barreto engaged with fans of the FemTech Focus podcast, intrigued editors, and journalists from the European health sector as well as high-impact founders and professionals in the healthcare space. As Dr Barreto is on a multi-city book tour, she dedicated the space to highlight several FemTech products featured in her new book, ‘Unlocking Women’s Health: FemTech and the Quest for Gender Equity’ (available for pre-sale in the US and Canada here).

From fertility tracking devices, post-sex clean-up sponges, and 3D printed pessaries, she also had one of Bloomlife’s Pregnancy Trackers- a patch-based wearable to monitor high-risk pregnancies. Fellow FemTech pioneer Julien Penders, Co-founder and COO of Bloomlife, also attended HLTH, allowing Dr. Barreto to connect him with other leaders in the field. On having Bloomlife featured at HLTH and in Dr Barreto’s new book, Julien shared, “We had the chance to feature our platform at her booth, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. People were excited about the innovations driving forward women’s health. I’m grateful to Dr. Brittany for her support and for being part of this important initiative.”

Pictured: FemHealth Insights providing menstrual products in all the conference bathrooms.

Day 2:

In the current healthcare landscape, women encounter several healthcare inequalities, including insufficient funding and research for female-specific diseases, as well as medical products primarily tailored to male biology. This disparity in care provision within the healthcare system often leads women to feel marginalized and lacking adequate support.

A powerful HLTH Europe keynote tackled women's health issues directly, shedding light on the global healthcare disparities faced by women. Entering the Main Stage to the familiar lyrics from Beyonce, ‘Who Run the World? Girls’, the panel emphasized the lack of funding and research for female-specific diseases, as well as the inadequacy of medical advancements tailored primarily to male physiology.

Dr. Priya Agrawal from MSD expressed that the healthcare community needs to do more and act swiftly to address diseases affecting women uniquely. Dr. Antonella Santuccione Chadha from the Women's Brain Foundation echoed this urgency, emphasizing the need for solutions within the next decade and stressing the critical role of data in clinical research involving women as she launched The Women’s Quota - “It's all about data. When it's there, you can't counteract the evidence base. But women are not included enough in clinical trials”. You can find out more about the work of the Women’s Brain Foundation here.

Day 3:

Day 3 featured two fascinating panel discussions directly in the Women’s Health Hub.

Tampons, Taboos & Technology: Menstrual Health Innovator showcase. Valentina Milanova, CEO and Co-Founder of Daye, Audrey Tsang CEO of Clue, Chandra Leo, HBM Partners and Dr Zahid Khan, CEO and Co-Founder of My Anna (pictured). We learnt how Daye is progressing with using the vagina as a source of drug delivery and diagnostics; Clue has already received an incredible volume of contributions when launching the feature for users to share confirmed medical diagnoses with the platform to support current and future research on female-specific menstrual disorders.

Menopause for thought: Innovator showcase featuring Laura Okafor, Founder of Perry, Melinda Nicci - Body Collective, Marie Reger - femfeel & medigital, Juliette Mauro, Femtech France. In recent years, discussions about menopause have become more open and widespread, breaking the historical silence surrounding this natural phase of life. Awareness has increased about the physical and emotional changes women experience during perimenopause and menopause but Laura Okafor shares that there are now over 100 symptoms associated with perimenopause; it’s more than ‘hot flashes’. This has led to better education, more resources, and improved support systems. Community has emerged as a crucial element in this journey, providing women with a platform to share experiences, seek advice, and find comfort in knowing they are not alone. All the platforms created and presented on stage have transformed their healthcare offerings by empowering women through community.

My takeaways from the first-ever HLTH Europe conference:

There’s a lot of promising innovation happening in the women’s health space; we should work on redesigning the systematic issues as well as responding to the challenges.

Notably in all Women’s Health audiences and workshops, women made up over 80% of the participants. There’s more work to be done to gain traction and bring all sexes and genders into the conversation to deliver equity in wellness for everyone.
Founders should pay particular attention to the differing and nuanced global healthcare systems when it comes to insurance and reimbursement; there’s the complexity of one size not fitting all with the different healthcare systems e.g. fertility options being financed by employee/insurance benefits in the US. I believe HLTH Europe offered a great starting point for this conversation and it would be great to see more Europe-specific discussions in the future.
Small in-person conversations between founders and communities can transform business models in minutes!

I will sign off with a lovely email that arrived last week: Following a conversation with Dr. Barreto at HLTH, Filip Wolski from Clouds of Care committed to including sex-specific data in all their clinical research moving forward. He shared, “From now on, we will report on sex-specific data to our partners and clients, and consider it in our applications and medical device development. Thank you, Dr. Brittany—we wouldn’t have made this change without you!”

Looking forward to attending HLTH Europe 2025!

Catch up on the inspiring sessions on the HLTH Community platform here.

About the Author:

Amy Keenan is on the 2024 intake for the FemHealth Fellowship, Campaign Strategist for Dr Brittany Barreto’s new book, Unlocking Women’s Health and currently studying a Women’s Health Mini-MBA. After completing a Medical Sciences degree in 2012, she has honed a career in the Communications, Technology and Media space driving large-scale programmes across Europe with a focus on customer & product engagement, growth, retention, and subscription management. Her mission is to elevate the FemTech industry by supporting founders to focus, scale & deliver, ensuring better healthcare solutions for women.

The Future is Female @ HLTH: