Reimagining Women’s Health Through Collaboration

Reimagining Women’s Health Through Collaboration
September 9, 2025 9 mins

Reimagining Women’s Health Through Collaboration

Reimagining Women’s Health Through Collaboration

Employers are uniquely positioned to transform a fragmented women’s health landscape into a connected ecosystem, one that replaces navigation fatigue with warm handoffs, personalization, and trust.

Key Takeaways
  1. The gender gap in care is structural, spanning how we study, deliver, pay for, and perceive women’s health. It shows up in productivity, cost, and retention metrics.
  2. Innovation is surging but siloed. A connected system would enable warm handoffs, closed‑loop follow‑up, and measurable efficiency across life stages.
  3. There are solutions and opportunities for employers to support women at every life stage, streamlining care, managing costs and improving outcomes.

“I book my mom’s appointments religiously and drive my kids to everything. But when my knees ache or I can’t sleep from hot flashes, I just push through. Who has time to be the patient?”

Sabrina is navigating life in her late 40s. A member of the “sandwich generation,” she single-handedly cares for her aging mom and teenage kids. Perimenopause has disrupted her sleep, moods, and energy, leaving her to question whether other health concerns, like frozen shoulder, itching skin, brain fog, and shortness of breath, might be connected to something deeper. Her primary care provider refers her to a cardiac specialist to address potential cardiac risks. A subsequent visit to a cardiologist results in a prescription for a statin but doesn’t connect the dots to perimenopause or other symptoms. 

“My OB cleared me at six weeks, but I’m not okay. I still leak when I sneeze, I cry every day, and I feel like I’ve lost my identity. Who’s checking on the whole me?”

Maya became a mom at 32 through IVF and is grappling with postpartum challenges. At her six-week check-up, she bravely opens up to her obstetrician about feelings of anxiety and sadness. While well-meaning, the doctor refers her to a list of external mental health providers – resources that operate outside the system where she delivered her baby. She faces waitlists, redundant intake forms and the exhausting task of piecing together care when she’s already at her limit.  

These stories show how the health care system isn’t just overwhelming—it’s fractured, fragmented, and clinically flawed. The result? Missed connections, emotional strain, clinical distrust, and care that feels incomplete and impersonal.  The clinical impact is vast: misdiagnosis, delayed diagnosis, disregard for symptoms and worsening of pre-existing conditions.

Sabrina and Maya were just two of the personas used in the Women’s Health Challenge, a workshop hosted by Aon Accelerate Labs in June 2025. Aon created personas for women of different ages, backgrounds and family structures to show how women navigate the health care system. While fictional, each persona is rooted in real, lived experiences. 

The Women’s Health Challenge was fueled by a growing urgency for change, with leaders from across the health care, innovation, and benefits space collaborating to answer one critical question: How can we depart from fragmented point solutions to a connected women’s health ecosystem that works—for women, for employers, and for the future of work? 

Women face a reality that stands in stark contrast to the rapid growth in innovation. Despite breakthroughs in fertility care, menopause support, mental health treatment and chronic condition management, these advancements often operate in isolation. Employers see this firsthand as they invest in more solutions without achieving the cohesion needed to truly support women’s whole health. 

Women’s Health in Flux—The Role of Employers

The challenges confronting women’s health today extend beyond individuals’ stories. At a systemic level, progress in specialized services clashes with the reality of fragmentation, leaving women to shoulder the responsibility of connecting the dots. New research highlights some staggering trends that underscore just how disconnected the experience has become:

  • Five vendors, too few connections: The average employer offers five or more women’s health solutions, yet only 16% achieve integration between providers.1 Disconnection is often seen across open access provider networks, pharmacy benefit managers, virtual care, behavioral health, employee assistance programs, maternity care and more.
  • Disjointed care: As illustrated by Sabrina and Maya, women frequently recount experiences of repetitive screenings, multiple portals, and conflicting advice from unaligned care teams. 
  • Burnout for all: Not only do employees face navigation fatigue trying to make disparate programs work, but HR teams are burdened with managing a growing roster of providers, contracts and metrics that, ultimately, don’t connect. 

16%

The average employer offers five or more women’s health solutions, yet only 16% achieve integration between providers.

Fragmentation places tremendous pressure on women, many of whom already bear the emotional labor of managing their household as well as the unpaid role of caregivers for others while trying to meet their own health needs. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that 35% of Americans avoid care due to access barriers2 or that women are more likely to take leaves to manage family demands. 

For employers, fragmented care leaves no one satisfied—not employees, their families, or executive leadership seeking ROI on burgeoning benefits budgets. The solution can’t be more point solutions. It must be a strategic rethink—a transformation of women’s health into a system centered on connection, personalization, and shared outcomes. 

35%

Americans avoid care due to access barriers.

Three Game-Changing Ideas from the Aon Accelerate Labs Women’s Health Challenge 

At the Women’s Health Challenge, innovators co-created potential solutions designed to address fragmentation and foster collaboration across the ecosystem. These concepts seek to deliver not just care but flow, creating seamless, whole-health journeys for women. 

  1. HerCircle – One Care Circle. Whole-Person Support
    HerCircle represents the shift from fragmented services to coordinated care platform. At its core, it’s a clinically integrated entry point—acting as an experience layer that connects disparate vendors. Imagine a woman benefiting from a single intake form that links her postpartum physical and mental health needs, providing her with warm handoffs to the right specialists without unnecessary bureaucracy. Care Allies within HerCircle support women throughout their journeys, removing the guesswork from every life stage. 
  2. Shherpa – Guiding Every Woman Through Every Stage of Her Health Journey 
    Named after the trusted guides who lead others through challenging terrain, Shherpa is a coalition-driven solution. It standardizes navigation across multiple vendor networks, providing a centralized hub where women can seamlessly manage their menopause and cardiac health concerns, for example. By prioritizing proactive, coordinated care, Shherpa ensures women never feel adrift in their journeys. 
  3. HerStory – Transform Women’s Health. Strengthen Your Workforce
    HerStory is a proactive, technology-enabled platform integrating mental, physical, and reproductive health into a cohesive experience designed to improve outcomes and reduce long-term costs. By weaving together comprehensive preventive care, this model strengthens women’s health while also building trust within the workforce. 

These ideas are still in the early stages of development, but their shared goal is clear: replace sporadic benefits with holistic ecosystems designed for real impact. 

 

Employers as Ecosystem Architects 

Employers can play a pivotal role in building an ecosystem where care revolves around what women need. Unlike vendors or care providers, employers have unique visibility into the full scope of women’s health journeys, from fertility to menopause to chronic care. They also hold buying power and influence strong enough to demand better integration and collaboration from partners. 

By shifting from benefit accumulation to benefit orchestration, employers can deliver solutions that are:

  • Connected: Driven by shared data standards that enable warm handoffs and real-time personalization. 
  • Personalized: Proactive and responsive to women’s life stages, caregiving responsibilities, and intersectional identities. 
  • Equitable: Proactively closing gaps in access or outcomes, particularly for underrepresented populations and those in care deserts.

What Employers Can Do Now

  • Start with an audit: Map your current vendor landscape and identify redundancies. Do solutions overlap without sharing data? Are there clear gaps in care? Consider surveys or focus groups to ensure employees’ voices are heard.
  • Include a robust data review: In addition to a vendor landscape review, incorporate a robust data review of demographic trends, preventive care utilization, provider access or condition prevalence. Use insights to identify priority areas and align all vendors and solutions around shared goals.
  • Create connections: Engage with women in your organization. Connect with (or create) women’s employee resource group (ERG), conduct employee sensing through surveys and focus groups to share experiences and needs. Additionally, ensure existing benefits are well communicated and understood.
  • Require integration: Include interoperability and data-sharing protocols in your vendor contracts to create a seamless system.
  • Invest in navigation layers: Develop centralized entry points that route members to the right care at the right time.
  • Create shared metrics: Engage your providers with unified KPIs that measure engagement, satisfaction and cost outcomes across the ecosystem.
  • Encourage collaboration: Foster partnership-focused conversations among your vendors. Building relationships will help the ecosystem thrive. ERGs can also collaborate with vendors in story-telling sessions or webinars.

A Call to Action 

Fragmentation breeds frustration, inefficiency and poor health outcomes, not just for women but for the organizations that support them. Through collaboration and investing in integrated solutions, employers become ecosystem architects capable of transforming the future women’s health. When women thrive, workplaces do too.

This is more than an opportunity for change, it’s a call to lead. Are you ready to reimagine what’s possible? 

Thank you to the participants of the Women’s Health Challenge, Aon Accelerate Lab:

Representatives from Hinge Health: Keith Coltura, Claire Morrow, and Elizabeth Kelly; Pomelo Care: Ranjani Ahrens and Shyamali Choudhry; Progyny: Joanna Balogh-Reynolds, Geoffrey Clapp, and Julie Stadlbauer; Rock Health Advisory: Megan Zweig; and Spring Health: Lindsey Conon, Jen Foley, and Ida Hishmeh. Facilitators: Creature Studio

If you're interested in collaborating and helping solve other timely, high-impact challenges, be on the lookout for future Aon Accelerate Labs – let’s build bold ideas together.

1 Evernorth Health Services and Ipsos. The Importance of Women’s Reproductive Health Care and Benefits. 2023
2 Becker’s Hospital Review

General Disclaimer

This document is not intended to address any specific situation or to provide legal, regulatory, financial, or other advice. While care has been taken in the production of this document, Aon does not warrant, represent or guarantee the accuracy, adequacy, completeness or fitness for any purpose of the document or any part of it and can accept no liability for any loss incurred in any way by any person who may rely on it. Any recipient shall be responsible for the use to which it puts this document. This document has been compiled using information available to us up to its date of publication and is subject to any qualifications made in the document.

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