Panel
Women's Health: Addressing Disparities from Health Leadership to Patient Care
Milken InstituteJoanne Kenen, Janine Austin Clayton, Isabella Danel, Freda Lewis-Hall, Saralyn Mark, Paula Schneider
- Clinical trial results initiated in 2017 under the 21st Century Cures Act are anticipated to emerge over an extended period, with future data on clinicaltrials.gov expected to be disaggregated by sex, gender, and race or ethnicity.
- Research methodologies are projected to shift toward transdisciplinary, multi-sector approaches and convergence science, incorporating internal biological factors, external social contexts, and life course data into a multi-dimensional framework.
- Efforts to address health inequities include tracking social determinants, addressing violence against women by focusing on children and parenting to break intergenerational cycles, and leveraging the Sustainable Development Goals and UN General Assembly agreements to hold governments accountable for gender equality.
- Specific timelines indicate that at the current rate of equity movement, parity and equity are not expected to be achieved until 2075, while specific initiatives like women in healthcare investment groups aim to reach 25 percent female decision-makers.
- Drug development and precision health initiatives expect to move toward starting from scratch to build from the base, optimizing treatment development by understanding disease and host biology, and targeting age and gender at both ends of the spectrum with minimal additional expenditure.
- Technology deployment plans include using drones for on-demand blood product delivery for pregnancy hemorrhaging in remote areas like the Amazon, utilizing telemedicine to connect rural populations with experts in locations such as Bolivia, and deploying point-person training for young women in India to provide high-grade care.
- Future leadership models aim to evolve from "hallucinatory" definitions to vision-led approaches, with expectations that artificial intelligence can rapidly problem-solve using existing data, exemplified by an upcoming summit in San Francisco on November 8th.
- Structural changes to workforce and policy include implementing gender-equal and paid maternity and paternity leave, formalizing sponsorship programs led by male colleagues, and accelerating the translation of research into gender-specific design elements for products, programs, and policies.