How Benefits Leaders May Reduce The Discrepancy In Women’s Heart Health.
When creating health benefits plans, businesses that want to promote employee heart health must keep in mind that men and women receive significantly different levels of cardiac care.
In America, women’s heart health is a significant concern because they are twice as likely as men to die from a heart attack. Employers’ top health priorities include improving heart health, and the CDC has even urged them to choose health plans that offer home blood pressure monitors as a preventative measure. However, implementing heart health benefits schemes universally won’t help improve heart health. Instead, when creating health benefits programs, employers that want to promote employee heart health must take into account the large discrepancies in cardiac care between men and women.
Unfortunately, there is a knowledge gap that needs to be closed. Heart health is frequently disregarded as a serious and potentially fatal women’s health issue, both by women and employer groups. In fact, the leading cause of death for women in the United States is heart disease. Additionally, it’s commonly believed to be more of a problem for guys, yet data show otherwise.
Women are more likely than men to develop hypertension after the age of 60, but less likely to keep it under control. Additionally, while suffering heart attack symptoms, women wait an average of almost 40 minutes longer than males before seeking medical attention. Women are more likely to have bad outcomes following a heart attack as a result of this delay, which contributes to the disparity in cardiac treatment between men and women. Because it’s not well understood how heart attack symptoms can vary between men and women, many women put off getting medical help. In fact, more than half of women who had heart attacks were unaware that they were experiencing any symptoms. Cold sweat, nausea, lightheadedness, and an abrupt anxiety or panic attack are the heart attack symptoms that only women most frequently encounter. All of which are sometimes misconstrued for other medical conditions, such as anxiousness. Racial disparities in heart health outcomes must also be taken into consideration. Compared to white women, black women had a nearly 70% higher risk of dying from coronary heart disease.
Given the apparent inequities in cardiac care, employer groups and benefit executives should prioritize heart health on an equal footing with other issues of diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) and health. Employers and benefit leaders are in a special position to make a significant difference given that lifestyle modifications and increased understanding can reduce risk factors for heart disease. Adopting digital medicines that are specifically designed to holistically treat particular health conditions and take a personalized approach to care is a potent tactic for this attempt.
Helping female employees understand the two main risk factors for heart disease, excessive blood pressure and cholesterol, is crucial in the context of heart health. Hypertension, often known as high blood pressure, makes the heart work harder when pumping blood throughout the body. Because there are rarely any overt symptoms, it is frequently called a silent killer. Instead, it necessitates routine inspections and observation. Women who are 20 pounds or more overweight have a higher risk of developing hypertension, according to the American Heart Association. Additionally, women-specific life events like using birth control or going through menopause can cause high blood pressure. But there are other factors that can contribute to better heart health than blood pressure. Additionally crucial to improving results for heart health across all demographics is cholesterol management.
A greater understanding of the health problem of cholesterol is essential for improving overall heart health. Understanding cholesterol levels is essential for women because of estrogen. LDL levels, also known as “bad cholesterol,” can alter when estrogen levels shift, for example, when a woman goes through menopause, thus a woman who had previously had healthy cholesterol levels may see changes as they progress through life.
A potent instrument in the benefits toolkit for enhancing health literacy and promoting health equality in heart health outcomes is digital therapeutics. A recent study found that a smartphone-based hypertension program incorporating AI-driven, digital-only self-management and lifestyle coaching can lower systolic blood pressure similarly across age, race, and preferred language groups. The study was published in the Hypertension journal of the American Heart Association. It is possible that digital self-management programs could help decrease the 2x larger mortality disparity for women compared to men related to heart attacks because women experienced more blood pressure reduction than men. This shows the potential of digital medicines to help patients with hypertension from a variety of demographics adopt behaviors and lifestyle decisions that lower their risk of cardiovascular disease. In this approach, digital treatments may be able to level the playing field for heart health and promote health equity.
By combining and displaying measurements in an understandable manner and offering insights to encourage healthy behaviors, this type of technology helps people better understand and manage their blood pressure, cholesterol, and general heart health. Digital treatments can even reveal trends over time with regular use, assisting consumers in understanding how their heart health has evolved.
Additionally, the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in digital treatment technology makes stronger personalization possible, which is essential for bridging the gender-specific cardiac care gaps. Artificial intelligence in digital therapies can analyze complex data (such as cholesterol lipid panels) and spot patterns in a patient’s health. The AI can produce personalized insights that give people an accurate view of their overall health, the health risks they should be aware of, and how their behavior may be impacting their health using behavioral data, which can be manually entered or tracked through digital therapeutics or wearables. Additionally, AI in digital therapies is frequently developed with gender-specific alerts, procedures, and guidance to take into consideration gender variances.
It’s crucial that benefit executives consider these care gaps as they consider ways to address heart health. It is obvious that something needs to change in the way heart health is prioritized and perceived when viewed through the DEI lens. Increasing access to digital treatments that raise awareness and offer individualized and useful insight is undoubtedly a positive move.
Maayan Cohen, co-founder and CEO, Hello Heart
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