What the renewed women’s health strategy means for innovators and investors

The strategy highlights longstanding challenges across the healthcare system, including delayed diagnosis, unequal health outcomes, underrepresentation in research, and limited access to tailored care pathways. In response, the strategy sets out ambitions to improve healthcare experiences and outcomes for women at every stage of life. 

For the women’s health and FemTech sectors, this creates a major opportunity to accelerate innovation in diagnostics, digital health, wearable technologies, preventative care, and personalised medicine. 

A growing opportunity for women’s health innovation

The renewed strategy reflects increasing recognition that women’s health has historically been underserved, both clinically and commercially. At the same time, demand for new solutions is growing rapidly across healthcare systems, investors, and patient communities. 

Several priorities outlined in the strategy are particularly relevant for innovators developing women-centred technologies: 

• Earlier diagnosis and faster access to care. 

• Digitally enabled and community-based healthcare. 

• Better representation of women in research and evidence generation. 

• Data and AI-driven approaches to prevention and personalised care. 

• More efficient and sustainable healthcare delivery models.

Together, these priorities are shaping a more supportive environment for innovation, particularly for SMEs and start-ups developing scalable healthcare technologies. 

Where innovation is already happening

Across the UK innovation ecosystem, companies are already responding to unmet needs in women’s health through technologies designed to improve hormone monitoring, reproductive health, and gynaecological diagnostics. Innovation is also advancing in areas such as cardiovascular health in women, menstrual and menopause care, and chronic pain management, reflecting growing recognition that many conditions affecting women remain underdiagnosed and underserved.

Alongside this, innovators are developing more accessible HealthTech and AI-enabled preventative healthcare solutions, helping to improve early intervention, patient monitoring, and personalised care pathways.

Importantly, innovation overall is also becoming more inclusive. Founders are increasingly addressing gaps in care that have historically been overlooked, including products designed for underserved communities and technologies tailored to improve accessibility for people with disabilities.

Examples include FlowSense, which is developing a novel menstrual flow detection device for the visually impaired, and Bèbèdí, which is creating a waist-worn wearable designed to track women’s health in a way that better reflects female lifestyles and experiences. Other innovators, such as YUTHERA and VisOvum, are also developing technologies focused on improving gynaecological care through non-invasive neurostimulation and AI-driven pelvic health screening tools.

At CPI, this is translating into active collaboration with innovators across the women’s health and FemTech space, supporting the critical shift from early-stage development to clinically validated, manufacturable and adoption-ready healthcare technologies.

Turning policy ambition into scalable healthcare solutions

While the strategy sets an important direction, innovation alone is not enough. Translating new ideas into clinically validated, scalable healthcare solutions remains one of the biggest challenges facing the sector. 

For many innovators, barriers still include: 

• Generating robust clinical evidence. 

• Navigating regulatory pathways. 

• Accessing manufacturing and scale-up expertise. 

• Demonstrating health economic value. 

• Integrating technologies into NHS care pathways.

Addressing these challenges requires collaboration across industry, healthcare providers, investors, and translational R&D organisations. This is where organisations like CPI can play an important role in accelerating innovation and reducing risk for developers and investors alike. 

Supporting the next generation of women’s health technologies

CPI supports healthcare innovators through expertise spanning product development, digital technologies, diagnostics, formulation science, manufacturing, and scale-up. For women’s health innovators, this can include support across several critical areas. 

1. Accelerating product development 

Developing HealthTech requires more than a strong idea. Innovators need access to the technical expertise, infrastructure, and delivery capability required to move efficiently from concept through to validation and commercial readiness. 

We support this through multidisciplinary expertise spanning medical device development, electronics and software engineering, AI and machine learning, and product design and prototyping. This is combined with support in regulatory and market strategy, alongside project delivery and scale-up capabilities that help innovators navigate the path from early development to commercial adoption. 

2. Enabling digitally connected healthcare 

The strategy places strong emphasis on digital-first and preventative care models. As healthcare becomes increasingly connected, innovators must develop technologies that integrate data, patient experience, and clinical workflows effectively. 

CPI enables the development of digitally enabled healthcare technologies, including connected devices, software platforms, AI-enabled tools, and data-driven health solutions designed to improve patient monitoring and clinical decision-making. 

3. Improving evidence generation and testing 

The renewed strategy also highlights the importance of women-centred research and evidence generation. Historically, women have often been underrepresented in healthcare research and device design. Improving outcomes requires technologies that are developed and tested with women’s physiological needs in mind. 

We bring together expertise in diagnostics, assay development, biomarker research, and device testing. This includes the development of anatomically representative testing approaches that help innovators design products better suited to female patients and healthcare applications. 

Why this matters now

Women’s health innovation is gaining momentum globally, driven by growing awareness, increasing investment activity, and stronger policy support. The renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England adds further momentum by signalling long-term demand for technologies that improve healthcare access, outcomes, and patient experience. 

For innovators and investors, this creates opportunities to develop solutions that address both major healthcare challenges and significant commercial markets. 

The organisations that succeed will be those able to combine strong science and engineering with evidence generation, scalability, patient-centred design, and clear pathways to adoption. 

Building the future of women’s health together

The future of women’s healthcare will depend on collaboration across the innovation ecosystem. Innovators, investors, clinicians, policymakers, and translational R&D partners all have a role to play in bringing new technologies to patients faster and more effectively. 

By combining technical expertise with scalable development and manufacturing capabilities, CPI is helping innovators accelerate the next generation of women’s health technologies, from early-stage concepts through to commercial impact. 

As momentum continues to build across the sector, there’s a significant opportunity to create healthcare technologies that are more inclusive, more personalised, and better aligned to women’s needs. 

To discuss how CPI can support the development and scale-up of women’s health innovations, contact the team or explore our healthcare and life sciences capabilities.