For many women, menopausal symptoms such as sleep problems, joint stiffness, and hot flashes require not just one visit to the doctor, but multiple visits.
The CEO of the Institute for Women's Health Advancement ( Institute Advancing Women ’s Health ), Paula Schneider, stated at the Fortune Most Influential Women Summit held in Santa Barbara, California on Tuesday that once women enter perimenopause and menopause, they on average have to see “five or six doctors, trying to figure out all the tiny details of what’s going on in their bodies.” She said, “And there is no holistic approach to health care.”
Novartis USA (Novartis US) Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Reshema Kemps - Polanco believes that AI may provide a solution.
In this discussion sponsored by Novartis and hosted by Fortune journalist Ellie Austin, she stated: "I believe that one of the most important roles of AI in healthcare is to help connect the dots, and to do so at an earlier stage. Often, we try to address these issues in isolation... making a little progress here, a little progress there."
She then continued, "But now, we can address these issues in different ways: better, faster, differently, and more cost-effectively. What I'm looking forward to is how the company will utilize AI — and this will be across various fields, whether it's collaborating with the government, AI companies, all parties within the industry, or other entities — to begin to fill some of these critical gaps in care."
Schneider indicates that her non-profit organization focuses on women aged 45 and above, and part of the issue stems from training. Future obstetricians and gynecologists receive only about two hours, or even less, of education on women's health in their middle age during medical school. She says that her organization is collaborating with a medical certification company to develop continuing medical education courses for clinicians and is using AI to create evidence-based training content. At the same time, the organization is also teaching women what questions to ask healthcare providers.
In the field of women's health, having to jump back and forth between different specialists is not a problem that only occurs during menopause. Kemps-Polanco indicates that many women face "a set of symptoms that require them to see various types of doctors, and each symptom is treated in isolation." She also used autoimmune diseases as an example, stating that in some cases, women patients can account for up to 80%. She mentioned that for Sjögren's syndrome ( Sj ö gren ’s disease ), one of the autoimmune diseases that Novartis is researching, patients have to wait an average of 4 years to receive a diagnosis.
Kemps-Polanco believes that this is precisely where AI can play a role. She says that a patient may visit a dermatologist, a rheumatologist, and a primary care physician, "and you can't always expect that the medical records from these visits to be interconnected." She has personally experienced this issue herself. She recounted an instance when she was in the emergency room and experienced several symptoms that were not related to each other at the time; so, she entered these symptoms into a AI tool.
She said, "I don't know how accurate it is exactly, but it did help me initiate a conversation. It really made me start to think about what new possibilities there are now for patients—whether women, men, or anyone else—to be able to connect these clues and receive screening, treatment, diagnosis, and cure earlier."
President and CEO Wendy Barnes stated that women should still seek medical services that involve human intervention. When asked how to evaluate the new wave of middle-aged health platforms, she said that such care should be supported by clinical evidence, and patients should be able to "interact with real clinicians, rather than being completely driven by AI."
