Welcome to our new series The Pulse, covering everything you need to know about the age of intelligent health.
From ovarian aging and maternal health to cardiovascular and dementia risk, HLTH USA 2026 is programming the women’s health conversations medicine has been too slow to have.
While women live longer than men, they spend 25% longer in poor health. The healthspan gap, between how long women live and how long they live in good health, is the defining focus of the next frontier in women’s health.
“Diminished healthspan is only one of the consequences of generations of silo-ing, underfunding and underserving the health of half the population,” Dr. Suzanne Gilberg, a board-certified OB-GYN and the chief clinical officer at Monarch Health, tells HLTH.
The question becomes, what underappreciated levers will help women live healthier for longer? What will it really take to move the needle on women’s whole health?
What’s overdue is a system built around women’s biology, and we are at an inflection point. More research arms, innovations, and startups are rapidly challenging a system that was not built on women’s biology.
Women’s health is not a niche. Thought leaders, physicians, and advocates are expanding how we define women's health, framing it as the research, investments and innovations poised to address all the conditions that differently or disproportionately affect women across the lifespan.
“I want people to see women’s health as a continuum,” Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global, a behavior change technology platform, told me last week.
The healthspan gap
Researchers are targeting midlife as the prime window to intervene in women's long-term health outcomes. Perimenopause is a ripe time for chronic diseases like heart disease to take root. And renowned neuroscientist and women’s brain health specialist Dr. Lisa Mosconi underscores that dementia, which women disproportionately face, is not a disease of old age but one that shows signs in midlife. And yet, women are not given the information to properly intervene.
“For decades, women have been told that painful periods, fertility struggles, fatigue, weight gain, and sleep disruptions are all just part of being female,” Kelly Lacob, CEO and Co-Founder of Xella Health, an AI-powered women’s health testing company that will launch later this month, tells HLTH. “These are all signs of dysfunction that have a root cause, and if it has a root cause, it can be addressed.”
Early interventions, redefining aging, and helping women age with strength, vitality, choice can improve their risk for a host of chronic conditions. What’s more, pharma is paying attention to the opportunity to innovate.
“Pharma leaders are realizing that medicine plus healthy habits yields outcomes neither can produce alone,” says Huffington. “This is a very exciting moment especially for women who are more at risk for [dementia] and they live longer but are less healthy at the end of their lives.”
The investment opportunity
Women’s health has long been an investment whitespace, but there is momentum. Earlier this year, a report from AOA Dx found that women’s health exits surpassed $100 billion over 25 years, underscoring the power of broadening our understanding of the women’s health category.
Melinda French Gates recently pledged $250 million to support women’s health, putting her total investment in the space over the last two years at $600 million.
“I feel lucky to be living through an era when women are speaking out about what our mothers’ generation navigated in silence, but solidarity is no substitute for systemic change,” French Gates wrote in a New York Times op-ed last week.
Beyond a moral imperative, there’s a deep economic incentive to invest in women’s health. McKinsey found that the preventive health care gap for women is a $50 billion missed annual opportunity for U.S. health systems. In 2023, the Mayo Clinic found that untreated symptoms related to menopause cost the U.S. $26 billion in medical expenses.
Huffington is particularly encouraged by the women driving investment and attention to the conditions disproportionately or uniquely affecting women, including French Gates’ recent funding and Olivia Walton’s work in maternal health. Last month, Walton, the founder of Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America, launched a campaign to reduce maternal mortality in America by half within five years.
Healthtech companies and consumer wellness have also innovated to support women’s whole health. The next mile is going to be all about how health systems and partners integrate consumer data and translate it into clinically meaningful outcomes.
“Women's health has moved from an advocacy story to an investment thesis, and that's a major step forward. The challenge now is making sure we don't optimize only for the fastest returns,” says Lacob. “Investors increasingly recognize both the scale of the market and the demand from women for more personalized, proactive healthcare. My hope is that we don't mistake the first wave for the entire opportunity. Areas like GLP-1s and HRT have demonstrated that women's health can produce meaningful returns, but some of the biggest opportunities still require substantial R&D investment.”
At HLTH USA 2026, our women’s health circuit will tap the leading health systems, payers, physicians, researchers, and founders to uncover what it will take to meaningfully close the healthspan gap and reimagine a system that puts women’s bodies at the center from their reproductive years to menopause and beyond.
Prices increase this Friday, June 26 so register now and save over $1,100.
Alexa Mikhail, Content Lead and Senior Health Writer at HLTH, Inc. is leading the women’s health agenda and programming at HTLH USA this year. Join her in Las Vegas this November 15-18, 2026.
