TL;DR: Awareness in women’s health has built real momentum. The next phase is accelerating adoption. For companies in this space, the communications priority is demonstrating how their solutions fit into the systems that determine access.
Earlier this year, I attended two Femtech Insider webinars hosted by founder and CEO Kathrin Folkendt that explored where women’s health is heading and where some of the industry’s biggest opportunities still exist.
One theme surfaced repeatedly throughout both discussions: While women’s health has largely succeeded in building awareness, it has not yet succeeded in building infrastructure. That rift matters, and it has direct implications for how women’s health companies communicate.
Women’s health is no longer operating on the sidelines of healthcare innovation. Investment continues to grow, with funding in women’s health surpassing $2 billion across the U.S. and Europe in 2024. New companies are entering the space across diagnostics, care delivery, devices and digital health. Conversations around menopause, fertility, hormonal health, and maternal care are becoming more visible in both healthcare and mainstream culture.
But visibility alone does not create systemic change. Many of the biggest gaps in women’s health still exist beneath the surface, including clinical research that doesn’t fully represent women across life stages; fragmented care delivery models; reimbursement structures that don’t account for real-world complexity; and narrow definitions of women’s health that prioritize a handful of categories while overlooking chronic conditions, postpartum care, autoimmune disease and long-term hormonal health.
Strategic communications won’t fix those structural problems on its own. But it can help move companies, as well as the industry as a whole, from generating awareness toward achieving the kind of adoption and integration that actually changes outcomes.
The Next Challenge Is Integration
There is no shortage of innovation in women’s health today. Companies are developing clinically validated solutions, advancing research and rethinking how care is delivered across the patient journey. At the same time, real progress has been made on destigmatization, bringing overlooked issues into mainstream conversation.
That storytelling work remains important, but as the market matures, communications strategies also need to evolve. Advancement in healthcare depends on provider adoption, reimbursement pathways, clinical validation, policy support and operational fit within existing care models. Even the strongest, most innovative solutions can struggle to scale if they aren’t integrated into those systems.
This is the communications challenge many women’s health companies now face. The companies that succeed in the next phase of women’s health growth will not just be the ones generating attention. They will be the ones clearly demonstrating how their solutions fit into the broader healthcare ecosystem.
Moving Beyond a Consumer Focus
One of the more interesting tensions discussed throughout the webinars was the gap between consumer momentum and healthcare integration. Many women’s health companies have built strong consumer-facing brands and communities. Healthcare adoption, however, requires a different kind of communication strategy.
Effective communications should demonstrate:
- Clinical outcomes – When companies communicate meaningful clinical outcomes, they help build the evidence base that shapes future standards of care and makes broader adoption easier to justify.
- Economic value – Women’s health has historically been underfunded despite the significant costs associated with delayed diagnosis and fragmented care; communicating the economic benefit strengthens the business case for payers, employers and care systems.
- Provider relevance – Providers operate in complex, time-constrained environments, so companies that demonstrate how their solutions fit existing workflows make adoption easier for health systems to view as practical rather than disruptive.
- Long-term care impact – Highlighting the long-term implications of women’s health conditions broadens the industry’s focus beyond immediate symptoms and helps drive investment in research and care models designed around women’s lifelong health needs.
- Reimbursement potential – Reimbursement is often one of the biggest barriers between innovation and access. Communicating both clinical and economic value helps inform payer conversations and bolsters the case for broader coverage.
Ultimately, providers, payers and health systems need evidence that a solution improves outcomes, fits within care pathways, and addresses operational or financial challenges. Communications plays an important role in helping companies bridge that gap by translating complexities into narratives that support adoption across the healthcare ecosystem.
Influencing the Industry’s Priorities
Another takeaway from the Femtech Insider discussions was how narrowly women’s health is still defined. Much of the industry conversation still centers on fertility, pregnancy and menopause. These areas are critical, but they represent only part of the broader women’s health landscape.
Conditions like PCOS, endometriosis, postpartum complications, autoimmune disease, cardiovascular health and chronic hormonal conditions still receive far less attention despite their long-term impact on women’s health outcomes.
Even the language used to describe these conditions is evolving. Recently, experts proposed renaming PCOS from polycystic ovary syndrome to polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS, to better reflect its hormonal and metabolic impact beyond the ovaries.
That may seem like a small shift, but language shapes understanding. A more accurate name can influence how a condition is researched, diagnosed, treated, reimbursed and explained to patients. It can also validate women who have spent years navigating symptoms that were minimized or misunderstood.
The issues that receive sustained attention are often the ones that attract investment, research, policy focus and reimbursement support. Communications don’t just shape perception. It can also influence what the industry prioritizes next.
The Path Forward for Women’s Health Companies
The industry has made significant progress in bringing attention to women’s health. The harder challenge now is embedding these solutions into the healthcare system itself. The current phase of growth will be driven by which organizations can demonstrate—clearly, credibly and to the right audiences—that their solutions fit into the healthcare system and provide long-term value.
Communications done well is how that work becomes clear. It’s how evidence gets translated, value gets articulated and trust gets built with the people who shape access and make adoption decisions.
Women’s health is winning the awareness argument; that’s no small feat. But the adoption argument is still being made, and communications is how you make it.
