Over 200 women gathered last week in Boca Raton for the annual Women’s Heart Health Summit, hosted by heart health AI company Hello Heart.
The event, in its third year, brings together stakeholders across healthcare, including clinicians, researchers, employers, advocates and more, to share learnings and facilitate partnerships to advance women’s health. The primary focus is heart health—cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for women—with sessions on its relationship to maternal health, menopause and mental health.
“Most of our prevention, our diagnosis, our care is still built around the male patterns of risk and symptoms,” Ami Bhatt, M.D., chief innovation officer at the American College of Cardiology, said in her opening presentation. “We’re working with incomplete signals for women.” The consequences are delayed diagnoses, missed prevention opportunities, avoidable costs and lost lives, she said.
From PMOS (previously PCOS) to preeclampsia to anxiety to menopause, many conditions increase women’s heart disease risk, though the connection is often a “missed risk,” Simin Lee, M.D., founder of Systole Health, a virtual heart health startup, said in another session.
About a quarter of maternal deaths are tied to cardiovascular conditions, yet cardio-obstetrics as a specialty remains rare, Lee explained: only about 10% of cardiologists nationally belong to such a team and two-thirds are not trained in the specialty. “We don’t have the workforce to meet the challenge right now,” Lee said. “Pregnancy is a stress test. It is a way of seeing risk early.”
Funding landscape
Employers, payers and patients all feel the brunt of inaction on heart health, Lee said: “There’s a business case for doing the right thing for women.”
Lee laid out how the cost cascade builds: a pregnancy complication turns into a higher-acuity delivery, which leads to infant and maternal utilization, which turns into ongoing downstream risk. The average hospitalization involving a hypertensive disorder of pregnancy costs $41,790 compared to $13,187 for an uncomplicated pregnancy. Nearly 16% of U.S. delivery hospitalizations involve such a disorder, and the total aggregate U.S. cost within 12 months of delivery is $2.18 billion.
Questions benefits leaders should ask, Lee recommended, include whether their plan captures adverse pregnancy outcomes; whether vendors trigger the right follow-ups; whether members have accessible blood pressure monitoring; and whether the plan supports social needs.
Funding for women’s health research has been severely slashed under the Trump administration: over $2 billion in NIH grants were cut, primarily targeting research focused on women and minorities. The cuts disproportionately impacted women and early-career researchers.
This was the topic of the closing session at the event. Erin Michos, M.D., professor of medicine and director of women’s cardiovascular health at Johns Hopkins University, said, “I’ve been dramatically affected by all the terminations of grants. … This year, for the first year of my career of the past 18 years, I’m going to be predominantly now transitioning to a clinical role with less research.” The university lost $800 million in funding, Michos said.
“We normally talk about brain drain as countries elsewhere kind of draining into the U.S. Well, it’s happening in the other direction now,” Celina Gorre, CEO of WomenHeart, noted on the panel. “Europe is attracting researchers and scientists because they’ve still got lots of funding that they are devoting to scientific research.”
Requests for research grants that used to come to the NIH are now flooding biotechs and nonprofits. Amgen has escalated and improved the way it reviews requests for research grants in response to the shifting landscape. Amgen’s mission is “to leave no patient behind, and that really means filling this gap in places that we can,” Lisa Head, Pharm.D., Amgen’s AVP, said on the panel.
Some workarounds under the current NIH constraints, Michos suggested, include shifting the language in grant proposals away from diversity to health for all or representation for all, or shifting the focus from women’s health to sex differences more broadly.
(Editor's note: The conference session on research funding landscape was moderated by Fierce Healthcare Senior Writer Anastassia Gliadkovskaya.)
Technology use cases
While AI has much potential to predict risk and help women, the benefits will only be felt if women are involved in designing the models, Bhatt noted. And, it will only be effective if it’s easy for providers to implement. A 2024 American College of Cardiology survey found that specific areas where AI was perceived to be beneficial are risk prediction and stratification models (70%), AI scribe (69%) and EKG interpretation (63%).
Bhatt also spoke about the importance of managing patients in their home with remote monitoring to help intervene early. “The majority of healthcare happens in the home,” she said.
In a separate session, CHAI’s Lucy Orr-Ewing, chief of staff and head of policy, said the components needed for success with AI are supervised use and continuous monitoring, trust and education. She likened transparent model disclosures to a nutrition label for AI. Like Bhatt, she called for centering patients and considering their preferences when deploying the technology. The best scenario, she said, is when “things are competing on cost and features, so that it really feels like the best that we deserve.”
On the subject of trust, somewhat counterintuitively, younger generations—like Gen Z—are much less likely to want to share data with their provider and to trust the information coming from their provider. “We need to start a movement, but we need to think about that population because right now, they’re not trusting us,” Bhatt said.
Hello Heart launched the Women’s Heart Health Summit in 2024 with the recognition that women’s heart health remains underfunded, underresearched and underdiagnosed. Its goal is to build an interdisciplinary community that can effect change, bringing together leaders across the healthcare ecosystem to accelerate partnerships and share emerging research and innovation.
Editor's Note: The description of Hello Heart was updated from "heart monitor maker" to "heart health AI company" to reflect that while a monitor is part of the company's offering, the company does not manufacture it.