SKI and Jhpiego to launch a collaborative report to improve health outcomes of women

The burden on women’s health is consistently high across various disease areas. Approximately 50 million women in India grapple with reproductive health issues. Anaemia is particularly prevalent, affecting approximately 50% of women of reproductive age, and leading to complications during pregnancy and childbirth.?

Furthermore, entrenched gender inequalities often hinder access to necessary diagnostic products and services. Social and cultural barriers hinder access to healthcare facilities and agencies to make health-related decisions thereby affecting health-seeking behaviour among women. For instance, 89.9% of women cannot make independent decisions about their healthcare according to the NHFS-5 survey.

This results in a delay in detecting serious health conditions which not only lowers survival rates but also leads to increased medical costs including out-of-pocket expenditure. Addressing these issues is crucial for improving women's health outcomes in India.

This calls for a dire need to orient efforts to bring about a gender-responsive change in the field of screening and diagnostics in India.?

On the demand side, it is imperative to enhance women’s health-seeking behaviors through the promotion of awareness and the empowerment of women’s agency. On the supply side, the accessibility of screening and diagnostic services must be enhanced by ensuring that the solutions provided are tailored to the user. The life course approach to women's health should be central to programmatic strategies for screening and diagnostics. Furthermore, these programmatic interventions should be seamlessly integrated within the public health system, rather than being implemented in isolation.

The future of screening and diagnosis is technology-led across disease areas as we see maturity in policy reforms, increased private investments, efforts to improve health system capacity and a surge in domestic innovations to further the diagnostics landscape.?

However, the design of these solutions must consider the local, social and cultural context in how they need to be deployed. Additionally, innovators need sustainable financing mechanisms to reach and service underserved markets.?

As part of our efforts at Sattva Knowledge Institute, in collaboration with Jhpiego , a national-level stakeholder convening was conducted on improving women’s health outcomes through effective screening and diagnostics, with technology as an enabler. The convening had more than 30 experts from diverse backgrounds including private sector corporations, research organisations, pharmaceutical companies and innovators as well as frontline workers.

Insights from the convening have been condensed into a report along with the following solution ideas to enable upstream system-level problem-solving.

• An assessment framework to influence capital flow into products?
• A stage-by-stage demonstration of financing instruments to inform funders on specific impact funding instruments that can be leveraged for supporting diagnostic innovation
• Community-validation infrastructure for products within low-resource settings
• A learning network for women innovators in diagnostics
• The need to reskill and upskill health workers to adopt a transformed role within an enabled ecosystem was deliberated upon

The next steps involve transforming each proposed solution into practical and impactful actions for all ecosystem stakeholders through landscape analysis, multi-stakeholder workshops, pilot programs, evaluations of results, and the sharing of knowledge.

Effective collaboration between funders, health system innovators, women, and healthcare providers is critical to achieving the desired outcomes in women's health. Funders and philanthropic organizations must extend their role beyond providing financial assistance to actively participating in the initiation and development of solutions. Additionally, it is vital to include women's health experts in the product development stages to effectively navigate and address socio-cultural obstacles.

The report, Building Knowledge Infrastructure to Improve Screening & Diagnostics for Women’s Health Outcomes, will be launched today, April 22 2024. We look forward to sharing the insightful findings and actionable recommendations to improve women’s health outcomes.