The Critical Role of Data Collection in Improving Health Outcomes: From Research to Innovation to Care

Women and female-identifying people experience different health realities due, in large part, to a lack of meaningful investment in progressive and significant sex and gender focused research that allows for the exploration of female specific health concerns, including illnesses that disproportionately impact female identifying persons, and illnesses that differently impact them (Sivaniya et al., 2024).

It is therefore an imperative to discuss, in the pursuit of a more equitable future for people of all sexes and genders, the role of the sex and gender data gap as it contributes to the gap in health equity — and thus the role that research and innovation play in changing the status quo.

Research is healthcare. When the very ways by which we create new ways of knowing, diagnosing, and treating people continue to perpetuate the sex and gender data gap, this means that the care pathways generated also perpetuate the health equities gap.

As the World continues to invest in and investigate the sex and gender based differences across the female life cycle, My Normative can assist in closing the 1 Trillion dollar Women’s Health gap to reduce the global women’s health burden and accelerate better health outcomes for conditions that:

• Affect women disproportionately - such as dementia and autoimmune disorders (78%), Alzheimer's (66%), rheumatoid arthritis, migraines (WHAM, 2024)
• Affect women differently - such as cardiovascular disease (50% more likely to die within the year following a heart attack than men (WHAM, 2024)
• Are under-studied or under-resourced for women such as menopause and cardiovascular health (Cardiovascular disease is the #1 killer of women in the US, yet only ⅓ of the participants in clinical trials are female (WHAM, 2024)).
• Female-specific health conditions - such as Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) affects an estimated 8–13% of reproductive-aged women with up to 70% of affected women still undiagnosed worldwide and Endometriosis affects roughly 10% (190 million) of reproductive age women and girls globally. (WHO, 2024).

Let’s work together to make sure that the research and innovation you’re doing in female and women’s health is scalable and has the capacity to meaningfully change health outcomes on a faster timeline than was historically possible.

Here’s how My Normative helps:

• Data collection processes that enable the identification and disaggregation of sex, gender, and ethnic ancestry demographics
• Collection and identification of reproductive life stage changes and variability alongside hormonally related symptoms and reproductive events
• Hormonal state identification machine learning to serialize hormonal profiles that occur across the menstrual cycle
• Early identification of adverse events that could be associated with sex or gender based differences
• A derisked path to market by being able to understand/identify why an event occurs or what influenced the event

Join us on June 4th as we discuss the Future of Data Equity and dig into My Normative helps researchers more easily account for sex and gender based differences. Register today.

Want to get started today? Book a meeting with Allison.

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Citations:

Sivaniya S, et al. Sex and gender in health research: Intersectionality matters, Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, Vol 72, (2024),101104, ISSN 0091-3022.

Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM). Accessed 11 April 2024.

World Health Organization (WHO). Accessed 11 April 2024