Name: Prioritizing Women's Health
Uploaded: 2025-05-21
Duration: 14 min 41 s
Description: The founder of a digital healthcare company focused on women’s health talks about the barriers to providing patients with comprehensive care. From the gender gap in healthcare investment to a dearth of research on conditions that impact women, we’ll discuss the most urgent issues in the women’s healthcare space and how they can be solved.

The founder of a digital healthcare company focused on women’s health talks about the barriers to providing patients with comprehensive care. From the gender gap in healthcare investment to a dearth of research on conditions that impact women, we’ll discuss the most urgent issues in the women’s healthcare space and how they can be solved.

Prioritizing Women's Health

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OK, we're going to continue on the subject of women's health with a founder who in 2015 launched a network of women's health clinics with the goal of offering her clients, her patients affordable, comprehensive care, and she joins us now to talk about recent milestones in women's health and the challenges. that remain from the gender gap in investment and the enduring lack of research when it comes to health issues that impact women. Please welcome Dr. Somi Javaid, a board certified obstetrician gynecologist and founder of the US-based HMD Healthcare Clinics. Oh, we're going over this way. So what's Heather. Hi, hi, come sit down. How are you? er, because I believe we're going to have some slides. um, but hello, let's start first of all with the origins of her MD for anyone in the room who isn't familiar. So I mentioned that it was founded in 2015, in response to gaps that you had seen in the healthcare system both as a practitioner, but also because of your personal family experience. Tell me more. You're already going to make me cry? No, well, we, we can cry. There's cry. Um, I literally got a call that was my calling in life. It was my father. He said, tell me you need to come home. My mother, who was only 45 at the time. Had been complaining of left arm pain, shortness of breath. And chest pain. We were in Cleveland, Ohio at the time, the home of cardiovascular care, and um what her doctors had told her was caffeine. Her children ended up being 4, yeah, apparently ended up being 4 vessel diseased. Had the heart attack come. My mother would have died. Uh, I was pre-med at Northwestern at the time. 21 years old, uh, and made a promise to her and to myself that this was never gonna happen again and that I was gonna change the world. Uh, little did I know. What I had promised, uh, to do fast forward medical school residency, got my first job. In the US healthcare system, I was seeing 50 patients a day. That long ago promise of changing the world and advocacy was gone. And so when the timing was right, uh, Bought a clinic, opened my doors to a provider patient centric clinic specializing in survivorship, menopause, gynecology in Cincinnati, Ohio, um, and soon we attracted women from 35 states and 3 countries. And you say opened the clinic as if it was the easiest thing you ever did. I know that you had to raise a lot of money to do that, and women's healthcare is a notoriously difficult sector to attract investment in. What was that process like for you? Well, uh, they told me as a dinosaur because I was over 40, we won't say how many years above 40, uh, a woman from the Midwest of color that I had a 0.37% um. Chance of raising funds and the truth is less than 2% of BC dollars go to a female founders and so can we, uh, throw up some slides and I'll share some statistics of what I was standing up against? We're gonna see you should be able to see the slides on these screens to the left and right of the stage. Let's click through to the next one, please. OK, I can see it down there, but I was hoping, can, can you all see it up there? They will say got screens in front of them. OK, so basically in the United States, why should we care around the world, there's a billion of us in menopause right now. Menopause lasts a day, but then It's the 12 month menopause last a day, yes, but then it's the day after 12 months of no menses, but then the rest of your life is post-menopausal, and we're graduating in the United States 93% of our medical residents with the inability to take care of you in this stage, and it's way beyond gynecologic care. We now know that Alzheimer's affects women 2 to 1. And we are now identifying the changes in the brain due to estrogen receptors in that decline. So menopause affects us from head to toe. Undiagnosed, untreated menopause led to just in the United States $1.8 billion losses in work. Women are in the prime of their lives. I'm going to be 50 in a few weeks. I don't want to be sidelined by menopause. They are leaving work. Because of undiagnosed, untreated uh symptoms like brain fog, uh, word finding, cognitive decline, um, because we're living outliving our ovaries, um, the other barriers to care, I teach a lot of providers, they're given 5 to 7 minutes with their patients. How are you gonna talk about these topics that have had stigma, taboo, and shame, even in the United States, perform a physical exam, make sure you type it all up, put it in the electronic health records. I mentioned the funding. Globe, I told you in the United States less than 2% of VC dollars go to female founded companies. Globally, only 5% of research dollars went to research and development, and we need more than pharma. We need more than surgery. I'm a surgeon. We need more direct to consumer devices that collect data that really puts healthcare in the hands of women. Um, and in the United States, women were not mandated to be in clinical research trials until 1993, which speaks to this huge lack of research around conditions that impact women or how they respond to conditions that impact men and women. So. We can switch that off, but you're right, we were treating women in the United States like little men, so that's why my mother almost died. Cardiovascular disease remains the number one killer of women in the United States. And did you know that women are more likely to die of a heart attack than a man? And the uh gender of the providing physician affects your outcome. Meaning, if your cardiologist is a man, you are more likely to die. Is that not crazy? Because we're not believed. Like my mother was not believed crazy and scary and unacceptable and unacceptable. So what are some of the solutions to this? Obviously you with her MD tried to and have succeeded in rolling out a possible solution to this in terms of women having comprehensive healthcare, having longer appointment times as well, which is a very key. Element if we're thinking globally, you know, the women in these rooms, what tools, what information can we give them today to leave feeling a bit more empowered about their health? Yeah, so, um, let's fix the educational gap, right? I mentioned that 93% of medical residents are graduating with no education in where you and I are going to spend 40% of our lives if we're lucky enough. So we created something called Harredi University where we internally train all of our providers so that there were no delays in diagnosis, neither. The suffering and we were able to treat our patients. We are going to be licensing that so we are going to start training providers all over the country, not just TMD providers, and then also um educating our uh patients. Uh, we have a lot of female leadership even though we outnumber men in the workforce, about 75% of uh the healthcare workforce is female, but only 25% of us hold, um, healthcare leadership positions and we're also. Physician led and there you know we were talking about healthcare innovation and what is one of the number one barriers, even if it's the best idea is adoption. If the providers don't adopt the new technology, the new surgery, the new pharmacotherapy, it's and someone said 17 year gap, some of it's regulatory, but a lot of it's adoption. If a provider cannot figure out how to operationalize it, it's never going to be implemented. So we've gotten around that. And then when people told me, well, we're not going to cover. That that's experimental. We took matters into our own hands, collected data across 115,000 patient encounters, and presented it at major medical conferences so that it was peer reviewed and people could understand how we were doing things differently, truly making the patient the CEO of her care, along with the providers and creating this curated plan that was different than the status quo. Now earlier this year, you announced that RMD was moving completely virtual. You were closing. Clinics, um, tell us a bit about why you had to do that because I think it speaks to a bigger story about where we are in the women's health care journey right now. Absolutely. So it's all about reading, you know, I never imagined I would say this is a doctor, but reading the market, understanding what's going on and kind of meeting the patient where they're at. And as we were seeing reimbursements decline and medical costs go up, the cost of maintaining clinics, even though I know women need to be seen, um, physically, um, just was not sustainable. Plus our wait lists, as I mentioned, our original clinic Cincinnati, Ohio is not known for medical tourism, and women were coming from 35 states and 3 countries. And so we wanted to meet women where they were and expand our access. And to do that, we wanted to be less capital intensive, use the capital we had to expand nationwide, hopefully globally one day. Yes, playing devil's advocate, some people might say, how can I get the same standard of cow when I'm behind a computer screen, right? And so we So doubling down on virtual care is not new at HMD. We've been doing it actually since before COVID because so many people were traveling to us, but I don't know if you guys just saw this. The FDA last week approved Thial, the first ever at-home Pap test. There is now a new FDA cleared device I just saw it this week that performs 9 physical exams. There's genetic testing. There's genomic testing. There's cancer testing. You can assess cardiovascular disease. So there's a lot of things that we can do rendering fem tech. AI um and seeing the patient over Zoom and then the other thing that we plan on doing is partnerships with hospital systems and physical clinics in the areas where we're going to provide care and honestly they want to concentrate on what their providers are trained on whether it's the obstetric care, whether it's the primary care, and they really want to allow us to take care of the menopause solutions and then also partnering with employers so that we can take care of their um employees. Are there any questions in the audience for Dr. Javaid? If not, that's the debate. I'm going to come to you because you can get a microphone here to Bets today, please, in the front of the room because earlier this morning she cornered me outside to tell me some very interesting news about funding that is going, funding slash a prize that is targeting ovarian health. Tell us more and why it's important. So, um, I sit on the Brain Trust for X Prize, and last year in the visioneering, this is for people who don't know, X Prize initiated 20+ years ago, the Ansari X Prize, the first private space flight. So that's where we are today 20 years later. Last year for the first time ever, ovarian He was the prize of the year. So that's what actually has been launched a few days ago, and it's fantastic because it's not, it goes beyond maternal and menopause. It goes to this. An organ that hasn't been really fully studied for half the population will get impacted by it, and ovarian biology is the center of this and it's called the X X Prize, which is fantastic. That is amazing news and goes right along with this interest in longevity because people are like, why should we care about ovarian health? Well, for the first time we've ever, as we are living longer, we're outliving. our ovaries, and we mentioned in the last panel that we are living longer, but you know that women live longer than men, but we live those years in much poorer health. And so if we can integrate hormonal health and understand our ovaries much better, it's a key to longevity and not just living longer, but living those years healthier. I won't leave the women in this room with some tangible things they can do. To take control of their health, to maybe start thinking about longevity if they haven't already. I mentioned in the previous panel in the UK and the US, longevity started as a very white male conversation. It's now happily spreading, and we've got more women taking control of the narrative. Three tips from you, Dr. Javaid, for the women in this room as to how to take control of their health. Uh, #1, find a provider who specializes if you are in the perimenopause and menopause phase of your life. Find someone who specializes in that. 2, track your symptoms head to toe. I was talking last night at Dizzer. Frozen frozen shoulder is a sign of perimenopause and menopause, brain fog, word findings, sleep disturbances. Your provider can't meet you unless you're halfway and. Unless you are tracking your own symptoms, I always tell patients no one knows your body better than you do. And then number 3, do not be afraid of femtech innovation. A lot of it is very accessible, whether it's a swab test you could do at home. There's a great company called Tally Health. It tells you your genomic age, and then I have one last one, lifestyle. Um, make sure you lift weights. It's amazing. Amazing what you can do to protect muscle mass and bone density. The mortality from a hip fracture is 20%. Walking with a weighted vest 11 minutes a day can change that outcome for you. So very, very important to take care of your bones, and I know that you give out great advice and expertise on Instagram as well, so I would suggest that people find you that if they want to hear more. Thank you so much, Dr. Deva, for coming to speak to us. We really appreciate it. Thank you.