Women frequently experience long diagnostic delays or misdiagnoses seeking care for endometriosis, certain migraine subtypes, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, mast cell activation syndrome, and premenstrual dysphoric disorder, both in Ireland and internationally. These chronic health conditions disproportionately affect women, are often comorbid, and can fluctuate in severity across the menstrual cycle, during perimenopause and menopause.
Diagnostic delays arise for many reasons, including complex and overlapping symptoms across these conditions. Systemic issues, such as gender bias in clinical practice and health research, contribute to women not being believed or taken seriously, and these health conditions remaining poorly understood.
Digital technologies for women’s health, ‘FemTech’, are widely available, and often marketed as tools for monitoring and tracking reproductive health and health conditions. However, research has shown many of these tools fail to account for menstrual health irregularities, or enable comprehensive tracking of complex, overlapping symptoms, limiting their usefulness for women with chronic conditions.
While FemTech tools, including symptom-tracking-apps, may support earlier and more accurate diagnoses through symptom tracking, increasing patient health literacy, and generating data to facilitate healthcare professionals (HCPs) in assessing symptoms, their integration in to clinical practice faces challenges. Beyond usability issues highlighted by users, HCPs have raised concerns about the validity and accuracy of these tools, time constraints, and a lack of familiarity or confidence in interpreting patient app data.
This seminar and workshop will present findings from the study “Women’s Experiences Seeking Diagnosis and Using FemTech for Complex and Overlapping Health Conditions” including challenges tracking chronic health conditions and sharing app data with HCPs. The workshop will bring together stakeholders (HCPs, policymakers, researchers) to identify priorities and explore opportunities and barriers to engaging with patient-generated data in clinical care. Highlighting women’s challenges and fostering stakeholder dialogue will help identify ways patient-generated data can better support diagnosis and care.
