The Promise
Digital health technologies — artificial intelligence, telehealth, remote monitoring, wearables, mobile health applications — hold genuine promise for closing longstanding gaps in women’s health care. AI that can identify cardiac arrhythmias, flag high-risk pregnancies, or detect early signs of autoimmune flare earlier than current clinical thresholds could save lives. Telehealth that connects rural women to specialist care they could not otherwise access could reduce the access inequities that geography currently imposes.
The potential is real. But potential is not a strategy.
The Risk
Artificial intelligence trained on data sets that underrepresent women, women of color, and women with atypical disease presentations will produce algorithms that underperform for those populations — often invisibly. Faster error is not better care.
The populations who could benefit most from digital health tools — rural women, uninsured women, women of color — are also the populations least likely to have reliable internet access, digital literacy, and the devices required to use these technologies. Access gap in digital health mirrors, and often amplifies, existing health care access gaps.
The Femtech Sector
A growing industry of women’s health technology — tracking fertility, menstrual cycles, pregnancy, menopause — operates with limited regulatory oversight and significant data privacy risks. Women sharing sensitive health information with commercial platforms deserve the same protections as patients sharing information with providers. The regulatory framework has not kept pace.
What We Track
We monitor FDA AI and digital health regulatory guidance, federal digital health equity initiatives, privacy protections for femtech and health app data, NIH digital health research funding, and emerging evidence on AI performance in women’s health applications.
