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The rise of femtech: How brands can safeguard customer data
The global femtech industry is in great shape these days, with steady annual growth having it on course to be valued at $1.186 trillion by 2027.
Though this upward momentum is great news for industry business leaders, it’s important to remember that the rise of femtech comes with higher volumes of private customer data and a greater responsibility to protect it.
Studies show that some femtech apps have misused sensitive user data, so every femtech brand must adopt and maintain effective best practices for keeping customer data safe, staying legally compliant, and developing trust in their brand.
In this post, we’ll look at six of the most important strategies femtech brands can use to safeguard their customer data.
Understand Your Legal Obligations
As digital privacy has become a bigger and bigger topic in recent years, a regulatory landscape has emerged requiring all tech companies to adhere to strict regulations when it comes to storing and using customer data.
However, when you’re operating in the femtech space, these rules become far more stringent.
Healthcare is a strictly regulated environment due to the fact that businesses are handling highly sensitive data, and you’ll need to build a thorough understanding of your business’s obligations in this area to keep your customer data safe.
If, for example, your brand’s flagship product is an app for tracking menstrual health, the personal health data gathered on your users will fall under GDPR for EU customers, and HIPAA when you’re catering to users in the United States.
Becoming intimately familiar with all the key legislation that applies to your app and the rights of its users will give you a strong starting point for understanding the obligations your tech product needs to fulfil, and the tangible steps you can take to ensure you’re fully compliant.
Create and Implement a Data Governance Strategy
Data governance strategies establish internal rules and operating procedures that help to ensure your business’s data management aligns with legal requirements and industry standards, while also enhancing your brand’s data quality, cyber security, and operational efficiency.
Your brand’s data governance strategy should be clear and accessible to employees at all echelons of your business, especially those who come into contact with sensitive customer data.
This set of rules should include clear best practices on data storage, access, usage, and deletion.
While strong data governance is crucial for all kinds of tech companies, this is especially important for femtech businesses and other firms in the healthcare space, where seemingly minor mistakes can lead to customer harm and severe legal consequences.
By having firm guidelines for who can access sensitive data, best practices for data storage and organisation, and other important variables, you’ll be able to close off potential sources of leaks and streamline the way your business uses data for a higher-quality customer experience.
Practise Robust IT Asset Management
IT asset management is a set of practices that involves tracking all your business’s physical devices, data, and software.
With effective asset management practices in place, you’ll not only make it easier to organise your equipment and data assets but also help to prevent security vulnerabilities that could potentially put your customer data at risk.
Proper IT asset management is not only important when your data and equipment are in active use at your company but also when you retire pieces of hardware that could potentially be the source of customer data leaks.
Many IT asset management services specialise in securely recycling old equipment to guarantee the destruction of sensitive data.
By creating and upholding a system where you can track all devices used to manage sensitive customer data, you’ll be able to ensure that employees leaving the company or devices being retired won’t leave sensitive data vulnerable to leaks or attacks.
Ensure You’re Only Collecting Necessary Customer Data
When many femtech leaders wonder “how can you keep data secure?”, they may be coming from a standpoint where they’ve already collected far more data than their business really needs.
Data minimisation is a crucial concept you’ll need to embrace as a femtech brand, not only to make sure you’re keeping within data protection laws but also for the practical security measures that keep your customers safe.
If, for example, you provide an app to support women’s mental health, you might need to gather data points relating to your users’ general demographics and symptom tracking in order for the technology to function.
However, for the sake of data minimisation, you should make a point to avoid collecting unnecessary data like location tracking or personal information.
Enacting policies that ensure you’re only collecting customer data that’s absolutely necessary, you’ll both respect your customers’ right to privacy and reduce your business’s overall risk of a data breach and similar issues.
Carry Out Periodic Data Audits
Regularly scheduled data audits will give you an opportunity to review the customer data that you have stored, ensuring that this aligns with relevant privacy legislation, as well as your internal security policies and data governance strategies.
With a thorough audit of the data you’re holding, you’ll be able to flag any sensitive data that needs to be deleted, while also making decisions about moving data to more secure storage assets or updating your company’s security policies to reflect changing needs.
When you’re providing femtech tools where countless users can switch from being active to inactive or back every day, scheduling periodic data audits is essential for keeping your systems clean of outdated or expired data, and minimising the potential touchpoints for leaks, breaches, and cyberattacks.
Proactively Train Your Team
Any attempts to secure femtech customer data will only be as effective as the people managing these security measures, and human error can be a major source of security inadequacies for any tech company.
To minimise these kinds of risks to your customer data, it’s crucial to make time for regular employee training, including staff who don’t directly manage data.
Make sure that these training sessions are up-to-date with the latest legislation and general cybersecurity best practices, that they aim to help everyone understand why data privacy is important in the world of femtech, and the best ways to avoid falling victim to phishing, social engineering, and other potential cyber threats.
To reinforce the issues covered in your training sessions, you might want to follow this up with additional measures such as simulated phishing scam emails sent out periodically to your staff.
These kinds of tests and the data you collect from them can help gauge how effective your security training has been, and highlight any departments, teams, or individuals who might need additional education on cybersecurity.
Protecting Customers With Robust Practices
Though the rise of femtech has had innumerable benefits for women’s health, it’s important not to lose sight of the huge volumes of customer data that drive the industry, and the potential risk that this carries.
By researching your obligations as a company, and fulfilling this with robust policies, maintenance, and training programs, you’ll be able to keep providing a great service to your customers while keeping them and your brand safe.
We hope this guide has given you a great starting point for reviewing your company’s relationship with customer data and planning your next steps towards safer, more efficient IT operations.
AI may help speed breast cancer diagnosis for high-risk women after abnormal mammograms, a study suggests.
Women with abnormal mammograms often wait weeks to learn whether they have breast cancer.
Researchers at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley said an AI-guided workflow could help reduce that wait by quickly identifying those most likely to have the disease. Some women could move from imaging to evaluation, and sometimes biopsy, in a single day.
Dr Maggie Chung, first author of the study, said: “This is a really an exciting time.
“This moves us closer to personalised care, where we can tailor a plan so that each patient gets the right intervention at the right time.”
The study used an open-source AI model called Mirai.
The model was trained on hundreds of thousands of mammograms linked to patients’ cancer outcomes.
A mammogram is an X-ray scan of the breast used to look for signs of cancer. A biopsy involves taking a small tissue sample to test for disease.
The AI tool is designed to detect subtle patterns in screening mammograms and predict a woman’s cancer risk.
Researchers at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley applied the model to more than 4,100 screening mammograms at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.
Mirai identified 525 women, about 12.7 per cent of screened patients, as high risk.
Those patients could receive an interpretation of their mammograms immediately after the scan and have additional diagnostic imaging for suspicious areas on the same day.
Some women who needed biopsies were also able to have them on the same day.
The researchers said Mirai reduced the wait time for diagnostic evaluation from several weeks to about an hour.
For women who were ultimately diagnosed with breast cancer, it reduced the average wait for biopsy from more than two months to fewer than 10 days.
The researchers stressed that Mirai does not replace radiologists or make diagnoses on its own.
Instead, it acts as a triage tool to help physicians identify the patients who can benefit most from accelerated care.
The team analysed more than 114,000 archival mammograms before launching the programme, to ensure the model would capture enough high-risk patients without overloading the clinic with too many expedited evaluations.
The researchers said they hope AI will support a more personalised approach to breast cancer screening tailored to each patient’s breast cancer risk.
Chung said: “Right now, many women follow the same screening schedule but their individual risk can be very different.
“AI risk assessment gives us the chance to identify the women most likely to benefit from expedited care and get them what they need.”
Adam Yala, senior author of the study and a data scientist at UC Berkeley, said: “This is a powerful example of how AI can be a collaborative partner for physicians.
“It shows how we can improve care when we bring clinicians and data scientists together to design these systems.”
Women with primary infertility may face a higher risk of early menopause and reach it about a year earlier, a study suggests.
The findings suggest women with primary infertility may be more likely to enter menopause before the age of 45.
The increased risk appeared most notable among women with unexplained infertility or a history of endometriosis.
Dr Stephanie Faubion, medical director for The Menopause Society, said: “This study shows that women with primary infertility, specifically those with unexplained infertility or a history of endometriosis, were at risk for early menopause.
“Given that early menopause is linked to adverse long-term health consequences, these women may benefit from counselling that they are at risk of early menopause.
“This will allow them to monitor for early menopause and to seek treatment with hormone therapy, if indicated.”
Early menopause is usually defined as menopause before age 45, while premature menopause is menopause before age 40.
Women who experience menopause earlier may face symptoms for longer and have a higher risk of long-term health problems.
These can include cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and neurocognitive disorders. Osteoporosis weakens bones, while neurocognitive disorders affect memory, thinking or brain function.
The study, highlighted by The Menopause Society, involved nearly 700 people, roughly half of whom had been diagnosed with primary infertility.
It found that women with a history of primary infertility underwent natural menopause about one year earlier than those without such a history.
Researchers found no association between infertility and premature menopause.
Infertility affects around one in six people globally and can have consequences beyond family planning.
Previous research has linked infertility with higher rates of cancer and cardiovascular disease, although causes vary and may involve genetic, hormonal, in-utero or lifestyle factors.
In-utero factors are influences that occur while a baby is developing in the womb.
Earlier studies looking at links between infertility and early or premature menopause have produced mixed results, with some not accounting for different types of infertility.
The new study suggested that women with unexplained infertility or a history of endometriosis may have an increased risk of early menopause.
Endometriosis is a condition where tissue similar to the lining of the womb grows elsewhere in the body. It can cause pain, heavy periods and fertility problems.
Known risk factors for early or premature menopause include tobacco use, low body mass index, not having given birth and starting periods at a younger age.
Women who have had more childbirths and those with a history of oral contraceptive use have previously been linked to later menopause.
The researchers said women with primary infertility may benefit from additional counselling because of the systemic and long-term health effects of early menopause.
They also said women should be encouraged to seek evaluation and treatment if they experience a new loss of menstrual cycles.
A non-profit has launched an endometriosis documentary featuring Amy Schumer and Marilyn Monroe as it pushes for changes in how the condition is treated and understood.
The Endometriosis Collective has launched to change how endometriosis is researched, treated and understood, starting with a documentary featuring stories from people including Amy Schumer and Marilyn Monroe.
The feature-length documentary, “End of the Cycle”, will premiere in New York on Tuesday, and The Endometriosis Collective is making the film free to stream online.
Schumer, a comedian, writer and actor, has previously spoken of how endometriosis left her “on the floor in pain, vomiting from the pain, the pain that nobody can see.”
Schumer is one of several celebrities featured in the documentary. Other contributors include dancer Julianne Hough, Olympic medallist Brittany Brown and actors Janel Parrish and Folake Olowofoyeku.
The Endometriosis Collective timed the documentary premiere to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s birth.
Monroe, who died in 1962, starred in films such as “Some Like It Hot” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
According to a biography published in 1985, Monroe’s endometriosis was so severe that it destroyed her marriages, her wish for children, her career and ultimately her life.
The Endometriosis Collective said the documentary shares newly uncovered information about Monroe’s experience with endometriosis.
The non-profit said the information connects Monroe’s story to the experiences of women across generations, highlighting how far awareness, research and care still have to go.
A representative of the Marilyn Monroe Estate said: “By sharing this part of her story through ‘End of the Cycle,’ we hope to honour her legacy in a way that brings visibility to endometriosis, encourages more open dialogue and helps inspire the research needed to create change.”
As part of the premiere, The Endometriosis Collective is holding a panel discussion.
Schumer, Brown and Olowofoyeku, the documentary’s co-directors Sammy Jaye and Soraya Simi, and medical experts are due to be part of the premiere.
AbbVie’s Orilissa and Sumitomo Pharma’s Myfembree are among the approved drugs for endometriosis pain.
Hough, one of the participants in the documentary, starred in an Orilissa campaign in 2017.
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