The development of women’s health technology can be significantly enhanced with an empathetic design process. Our Director of Women’s Health, Kate Marchio, has identified three ways to boost empathy, potentially improving women’s healthcare experiences and outcomes, while offering a route to commercial differentiation.
As health tech companies look to better address women’s health and address the historic gender data gap, woman-centred product design has a critical role to play. It should be firmly rooted in an understanding of women’s needs and feelings. In other words, empathy. Yet, while empathy is easy to define, it is difficult to pin down and harness in a product development context.
We believe three key approaches can be used to overcome this challenge and imbue women’s health technology products with empathy. Enhancing design and development in this way could bridge gender disparities in healthcare experiences and outcomes. Companies that get it right have an opportunity to achieve competitive and commercial differentiation in this rapidly growing market.
What is the gender data gap?
As Caroline Criado Perez explains in her book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men 1 “for millennia, medicine has functioned on the assumption that male bodies can represent humanity as a whole”. This assumption has led to serious shortfalls in the quality and value of healthcare for women. Statistically, women are 50% more likely to be misdiagnosed than men following a heart attack 2. A study of post-operative patient treatment 3 revealed that women are ‘significantly’ more likely to be prescribed sedatives, rather than painkillers, when presenting with pain. And healthcare needs that are unique to women – such as those related to menstruation and menopause – have a long history of under-funding and under-research.
This whitepaper discusses:
- Understanding that empathy matters
- How to develop and apply an empathetic design process
- Taking action to ensure empathy is upheld including the commercial benefits of empathetic design
