For many women, menopause symptoms like sleep problems, joint stiffness, hot flashes, and more don’t bring just one doctor’s appointment—they bring multiple.
On average, women see “five or six doctors to try and figure out all the little parts and pieces of what’s going on with your body” once they hit perimenopause and menopause, Paula Schneider, CEO of the Institute Advancing Women’s Health, said Tuesday at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif. “And there’s no holistic health,” she said.
Reshema Kemps-Polanco, executive vice president and chief commercial officer of pharmaceuticals company Novartis US, sees a possible fix using AI.
“One of the greatest things I think that AI can do in health care is to help connect the dots and help connect the dots sooner,” she said during the panel, which was sponsored by Novartis and moderated by Fortune’s Ellie Austin. “Many times we try to do these things in isolation … and you make a dent here, you can make a dent there.”
“But now we can solve [these problems] in a different way: better, faster, different, cheaper,” she continued. “The thing that I’m hopeful for is how can companies leverage AI, and it will be multi-sector—whether it’s with government, with AI companies, with the industry, or what have you—to start to close some of these critical care gaps.”
Schneider, whose nonprofit focuses on women from age 45 on, said part of the problem starts in training. Future OB-GYNs get only “about two hours, if that” of medical school education on women’s midlife health. Her institute is partnering with a medical certification company to create continuing medical education for clinicians, using AI to build evidence-based training, Schneider said. It is also teaching women what questions to ask their providers.
And bouncing between specialists isn’t unique to menopause in women’s health. Kemps-Polanco said many women face “a constellation of symptoms that require women to go to different types of doctors, and each gets treated in isolation.” She pointed to autoimmune conditions as another example, saying women can make up as much as 80% of patients in some cases. For Sjögren’s disease, one of the autoimmune conditions Novartis is working on, she said patients wait an average of four years for a diagnosis.
That’s where Kemps-Polanco sees an opportunity for using AI. A patient might see a dermatologist, a rheumatologist, and a primary care doctor, she said, and “you can’t always count on those records being connected.” She has seen the problem firsthand. Sitting in an emergency room with symptoms she didn’t know were connected, she typed them into an AI tool.
“Now I don’t know how accurate it was, but it did help me have a conversation,” she said. “It really got me thinking [about] what is now possible for patients—women, men, what have you—to be able to now connect those dots and get screening, treatment, diagnosis, and cure sooner.”
Wendy Barnes, president and CEO of GoodRx, said women should still look for a human in the loop. Asked how to evaluate the wave of new midlife health platforms, she said care should be backed by clinical evidence and patients should be able to “engage with an actual clinician, as opposed to it completely being AI enabled.”