The issue of women’s health and wellness has been at the forefront of the healthcare news cycle, even leading to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services establishing a National Women’s Health Week and other various coalitions recognizing National Women’s Health Month in May. But data shows, despite this trend, female-identifying patients are still likely to experience less attention from caregivers, less investment in their health needs, and sometimes less comprehensive care
Studies and reviews reveal some of the ways female patients are receiving inequitable care:
- Women wait longer for pain relief, according to a Harvard Health blog, which revealed that during emergency visits, female patients are more likely to be prescribed sedatives over analgesics and, in some cases, are half as likely to be offered pain medication as male patients even after the same procedure.
- In cases where female patients receive care, the cost is greater than their male counterparts, according to a 2021 paper in the Journal of Women’s Health.
- The same paper sees the financial imbalance in medical research as well, stating, “in nearly three-quarters of the cases where a disease afflicts primarily one gender, the funding pattern favors males,” in that either the disease affects more women and is underfunded or affects more men and is overfunded.
With the shortcomings in women’s healthcare reaching across so many areas, addressing them will require an ecosystem-wide approach.
How can payers step up for female members?
Targeted efforts from health plans to reach female members and develop effective methods of supporting their healthcare journeys will become a critical priority.
“Women are just over half a payer’s member population,” says Allison Combs, Head of Product- Payer at Wolters Kluwer Clinical Effectiveness. “They also represent a strong opportunity for scaling care management to improve education, change behavior, and impact outcomes for both themselves and the loved ones they support.”
With many health plans running lean care management organizations, tools and content to drive this scale must be proven to not only speak to populations, like female members, empathetically but also to have analytic data to show that their tools drive behavior change.
To fully support this population, health plans must also be more inclusive, notes Eve Atri, Editorial Director of Emmi® patient engagement solutions. “Strive for gender-neutral language,” she advises, noting that members and patients who may confront health and wellness issues traditionally categorized as “women’s health” may not specifically identify that way. Outreach that is more inclusionary will reach more people.
