How benefits leaders can help close the women’s heart health disparity

Heart health is a major women’s health issue in America – women are two times more likely to die of a heart attack than men. Improving heart health is a top health priority for employers – the CDC has even called on employers to select health plans that provide coverage for home blood pressure monitors as an intervention. However, improving heart health cannot be done by taking a blanket approach to heart health benefits programs. Instead, organizations that seek to improve employee heart health need to understand there are significant cardiac care disparities between men and women when crafting health benefits plans.

Unfortunately, there’s an awareness gap that needs to be overcome. Heart health is often overlooked – both by women themselves and employer organizations – as a major women’s health concern, which can be deadly. In fact, heart disease is the top cause of death for women in the U.S. It’s also frequently perceived as more of a concern for men, but data proves otherwise.

Women over the age of 60 are more likely than men to develop hypertension, but less likely to have it under control. Additionally, women wait on average nearly 40 minutes longer than men to seek help when experiencing heart attack symptoms. Because of this delay, women are at a higher risk for negative outcomes after a heart attack, which further drives the cardiac care gap between men and women. Oftentimes, women wait to seek medical care because there’s a lack of awareness around how heart attack symptoms can differ between men and women. In fact, more than half of women who experienced heart attacks didn’t even realize they were having symptoms. Heart attack symptoms that are most commonly experienced by only women include a cold sweat, nausea, lightheadedness, and sudden anxiety or panic attack. Each of which can often be mistakenly attributed to other health concerns like anxiety, for example. We also can’t overlook racial disparities in heart health outcomes. Black women are almost 70% more likely to die from coronary heart disease than white women.

Given the glaring gaps in cardiac care, heart health should be as much of a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) priority as it is a health priority to employer organizations and benefits leaders. And, given that heart disease risk factors can be lessened through greater awareness and lifestyle changes, employers and benefits leaders are in a unique position to make a notable difference. A strong strategy for this effort is adopting digital therapeutics that are purpose-built to holistically address specific health concerns and take a personalized approach to care.

In the instance of heart health, it’s important to help female employees understand the top risk factors for heart disease – high blood pressure and cholesterol. Having high blood pressure, or hypertension, requires the heart to work harder when pumping blood through the body. It’s often referred to as a silent killer because there are rarely any outright symptoms. Instead, it requires regular screenings and monitoring. According to the American Heart Association, women face increased risk for hypertension when they are 20 pounds or more overweight. Further, life events unique to women, such as taking birth control or going through menopause, can lead to high blood pressure. But, blood pressure isn’t the only piece of the puzzle to stronger heart health. Managing cholesterol is also an important step in achieving better heart health outcomes across all demographics.

Cholesterol is often a misunderstood health issue and one that’s pivotal to better whole-heart health. For women, it’s pivotal to understand cholesterol levels because of estrogen. When estrogen levels change, so can levels of LDL, which is commonly known as the “bad cholesterol.” For instance, LDL levels can change when a woman goes through menopause, so a woman who has otherwise had healthy cholesterol levels may experience changes as they move through life.

Digital therapeutics are a powerful tool in the benefits toolkit for improving health literacy and contributing to health equity in heart health outcomes. A recent study published in the American Heart Association’s Hypertension journal found that a smartphone-based hypertension program incorporating AI-driven, digital-only self-management and lifestyle coaching can reduce systolic blood pressure similarly across age, race, and preferred language groups. Women had greater blood pressure reduction than men, suggesting that digital self-management programs could help to close the 2x higher mortality gap for women vs. men related to heart attacks. This demonstrates the potential of digital therapeutics to assist people with hypertension from diverse populations and help them adopt behaviors and lifestyle choices that reduce their cardiovascular risk. In this way, digital therapeutics could be one tool to contribute to health equity and level the playing field for heart health.

This kind of technology achieves this by helping people understand and better control blood pressure, cholesterol, and overall heart health by consolidating and presenting readings in an easy-to-understand way, while providing insights to help drive healthy behaviors. With frequent use, digital therapeutics even present trends overtime that help people understand how their heart health has changed.

Further, the increasing presence of artificial intelligence (AI) within digital therapeutic technology makes stronger personalization possible – a key component to closing the cardiac care gaps women face. AI in digital therapeutics can take complex data points (i.e., cholesterol lipid panels) and identify trends with a person’s health. Using behavioral data, which can be manually entered or tracked through digital therapeutics or wearables, the AI can generate personalized insights that give people an accurate look into their overall health, the health risks they should be aware of, and how their behavior may be impacting their health. Additionally, AI in digital therapeutics is often designed to take gender differences into account with gender-specific alerts, workflows, and guidance.

Related: How digital care can help prevent costly, invasive and unnecessary procedures

It’s important that as benefits leaders evaluate how they can address heart health, they take these care gaps into account. By looking at heart health through the DEI lens, it’s clear that something must change in the way heart health is being prioritized and understood. Increasing access to digital therapeutics that heighten awareness and provide personalized and actionable insight is certainly a step in the right direction.

Maayan Cohen, co-founder and CEO, Hello Heart