4 Predictions From Top VCs For Women’s Health In 2022

The necessity for extra funding in girls’s and household well being has by no means been extra pressing. The pandemic drove hundreds of thousands of girls out of the workforce resulting from household and well being obligations, a development that disproportionately impacts communities of shade. The American Medical Affiliation has known as our nation’s present Black maternal well being disaster “an American tragedy.” Transformative improvements in girls’s and household well being not solely advance well being fairness, however also can improve particular person household funds and contribute extra broadly to financial productiveness.

But, girls’s well being (an admittedly imperfect nomenclature which fails to embody the complete spectrum of range it providers) has by no means held its rightful place as one of many greatest classes in digital well being for enterprise capital. A number of years in the past, whole funding within the house barely hit $100 million; in 2021, it surpassed $1 billion for the first time. Whereas that inflow of capital is notable, it’s not almost sufficient. Simply 4% of all healthcare R&D and simply 5% of digital health investment is concentrated on girls’s well being, and ladies are nonetheless under-represented in almost all scientific trials.

The women’s health market is projected to hit $60 billion by 2027. As we wrap up a yr of milestones for the sector, I caught up with a few of the business’s main traders to get their predictions for the place girls’s and household well being is headed going into 2022.

1) Fertility tech will remodel assisted copy and put extra concentrate on males’s our bodies.

Not less than 1 in 8 {couples} battle to conceive, and it prices roughly $60,000 to efficiently conceive a toddler via in vitro fertilization (IVF). Worse, IVF is likely one of the few well being applied sciences that has seen utilization and outcomes decline prior to now 20 years. Technological breakthroughs pioneered by firms like Alife Health can enhance the effectivity and efficacy of therapy via laptop imaginative and prescient, diversified knowledge units, and vertical software program options. And though this sounds apparent, it’s nonetheless not broadly understood that half of all fertility points are tied to circumstances in males’s our bodies—an space that’s simply now beginning to see extra funding. 

Leslie Schrock, creator, entrepreneur, and angel investor, believes that the fertility dialog in 2022 will broaden to incorporate males, with investments going towards firms that target their our bodies and schooling, addressing circumstances corresponding to DNA fragmentation in sperm which might be a standard reason for recurrent miscarriage: “As an investor and mother of two boys, I used to be heartened to see celebrities publicly put money into firms like Legacy, and hope that their involvement drives additional consciousness and dialog about this drawback,” stated Schrock, who’s an advisor and/or investor in firms together with Alife, Maven, Oath, Legacy, and Emme.

2) Options will broaden to concentrate on under-served populations, particularly households in rural communities and people lined by Medicaid.

Many digital well being firms, together with these targeted on girls’s well being, had been initially constructed to service personal pay and extra easily-accessible populations, however the occasions from the previous two years have strengthened the necessity and alternative for digital well being options that successfully interact girls in rural populations and underserved communities. Half the infants in America are born below Medicaid, and a few of the main firms within the class, together with its first unicorn, Maven Clinic, are transferring past the preliminary employer buyer set to broaden to those populations.

Alyssa Jaffee, Accomplice at 7wireVentures, believes digital well being options ought to “concentrate on growing entry and affordability of testing and therapy providers by eliminating well being care’s geographic boundaries and increasing experience for therapy planning and total care administration into the house.”

3) Group-based client well being is making a comeback.

Many options focusing on girls’s well being have targeted on employers, however that has held again some customers from feeling snug connecting with others who’re going via fertility struggles, being pregnant, and changing into new mother and father. Not everybody feels secure sharing their being pregnant journey with an employer, significantly within the early phases.

Chrissy Farr, well being tech investor at OMERS Ventures, predicts there’s a huge alternative for functions that may construct neighborhood by specializing in shoppers, and that suppliers can even should be part of the combination.

“I’ve seen firms pop up within the seed phases to just do that, and it’s critically vital that these companies be sure that girls are accessing high-quality, evidence-based info,” she stated. “What I’m assured about is that Fb Teams should not the longer term for connecting mother and father at this overwhelming time, significantly given the rise in misinformation. We have to convey the mother group into the Twenty first-century and join girls to the help networks they want.” 

4) Precision medication is crucial to scaling care supply amidst rising demand.

The primary wave of innovation and funding in girls’s and household well being has targeted largely on growth of entry. The subsequent wave must concentrate on offering really personalised care and high quality outcomes by constructing extra inclusive communities on the affected person and supplier degree, and likewise via considerate functions of expertise. To take action, firms want to make sure that AI avoids bias and incorporates extra inclusive datasets and serves practitioners from numerous backgrounds and with experience throughout completely different modalities and specialties. 

Digital well being innovation can be vital to addressing a rising disaster: demand for healthcare providers in america is barely growing. What is usually much less mentioned is the not-so-slow march, the plummeting variety of suppliers throughout major and specialty care–together with OB/GYNs and embryologists—that’s inevitable within the subsequent ten years. We have to make the most of expertise and tech-enabled providers to reinforce the effectivity and efficacy of suppliers in order that we will proceed to satisfy affected person wants with out sacrificing high quality outcomes; platform options corresponding to SteadyMD provide a tech-optimized resolution to energy the present and impending digital well being demand for high quality care.

Aike Ho, principal at ACME Capital, is optimistic concerning the potential of expertise to unlock capability and deal with underlying structural points.

“I’m excited to proceed to see and put money into digital well being firms that aren’t solely delivering sought-after providers but in addition constructing actual expertise that scales past human constraints,” she stated. “That’s the distinction between healthcare firms that allow expertise versus expertise firms that allow healthcare.” 

As we method the top of a watershed yr for girls’s well being, these traders share a standard sentiment: we’re simply getting began. Cheers to a cheerful and more healthy 2022 for girls, households, and communities in every single place.