A sold-out summit at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering will bring together clinicians, researchers, regulators, investors and founders to discuss how artificial intelligence is being applied to women’s health, and what responsible development of these tools should look like.

AI × Women’s Health: Innovation, Challenges and Opportunities takes place on 25 June.

It’s organised by MEGI Health, a femtech company building a digital cardiovascular platform aimed at supporting women’s heart health through pregnancy, postpartum and beyond.

All 140 places have gone, and there’s now a waiting list.

Nina Sesto, CEO of MEGI Health, said: “We are seeing a wave of innovation in women’s health, and AI has the potential to accelerate it.

“The opportunity is enormous, but it only pays off if these tools are built on representative data and designed around the realities of women’s health.

“That is exactly the conversation we wanted to convene, across clinicians, researchers, industry and regulators.”

AI is increasingly being applied across women’s healthcare, with proponents pointing to earlier diagnosis, better risk prediction and more personalised care.

The summit will look at tools in development across fetal and gynaecological ultrasound, maternal cardiovascular monitoring and clinical decision support, alongside the question of whether women risk being left behind as the technology develops.

The timing reflects wider momentum in the sector: women’s health has been drawing more investment and policy attention, and the World Economic Forum and McKinsey Health Institute have estimated that closing the women’s health gap could add at least $1 trillion a year to the global economy by 2040.

A recurring theme for the day is data.

Women have historically been under-represented in medical research, and organisers argue that AI tools trained on incomplete or unrepresentative datasets risk repeating those gaps rather than closing them.

Sessions on data, ethics, privacy and equity will run alongside the more technical and commercial discussions.

Dr Fran Conti-Ramsden is a clinician at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, academic at King’s College London and Chief Medical Officer of MEGI Health.

Conti-Ramsden said: “Working at the intersection of clinical practice, academia and industry, I see both the tremendous challenges we face in delivering clinical care for women and the need for innovation, alongside the rapid development of AI and digital health technologies.

“But bringing innovation into clinical practice is fraught with challenges.

“I hope this day brings together people from across the landscape to discuss and define those challenges as well as celebrate progress in the field, sparking dialogue on how we should innovate responsibly, and to make sure women’s health is not left behind.”

The half-day programme is split into four sessions, chaired respectively by Professor Eugene Oteng-Ntim, Professor Richard Dobson, an interactive breakout segment, and Professor Asma Khalil. Other speakers include MiRa Jacobs (MHRA), Professor Jane Hirst (The George Institute), Tulsi Patel (Hertility) and Dr Kimberley Peven (Scarlet), among others.

Organisers say they hope the event will help build a longer-term UK community around clinical AI in women’s health.

Senior executives from the World Economic Forum, Takeda and Gilead are among the latest speakers confirmed for Women’s HealthX, which takes place on 3–4 December 2026 in Boston, Massachusetts, as the event publishes its full agenda.

The newly announced speakers are Melissa Patel, lead for women’s health responsible investing at the World Economic Forum; Nicola Greenway, chief human resources officer at Takeda; and Jyoti Mehra, executive vice president of human resources at Gilead.

They join more than 75 confirmed speakers and a delegate list the organisers say will exceed 750 leaders from pharma and biotech, hospitals and health systems, payers and policymakers, all focused on closing the sex-difference data gap in healthcare.

Organisations registered to attend span much of the sector.

In pharma and biotech they include Novartis, Merck, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Bayer, Biogen, Johnson & Johnson, Gilead Sciences, Takeda, UCB, Astellas, EMD Serono, Amgen, Bristol Myers Squibb, Boehringer Ingelheim and Chiesi.

Among hospitals, health systems and academic medical centres are Mayo Clinic, Mass General Brigham, Northwell Health, UPMC, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Weill Cornell Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Northwestern Medicine, Mount Sinai Health System, UMass Memorial Medical Center, Tufts Medical Center, Yale School of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, University of Pennsylvania Health System and NYU Langone Health.

Payers and health plans represented include CVS Health, Humana, Cigna Healthcare, Kaiser Permanente, Elevance Health, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Evernorth, Fidelis Care, Health Plans Inc and UPMC Health Plan.

On the government, policy and regulatory side, attendees include the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, ARPA-H, the FDA, HHS, the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Metro Public Health Department, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, the NHS, the Northern Mariana Islands Board of Nursing and Planned Parenthood of Florida.

A sample attendee list is available here.

Newly confirmed panels

Patel will join Sheri Schully, deputy chief medical and scientific officer at the All of Us Research Program, and Lindsey Miltenberger, chief advocacy officer at the Society for Women’s Health Research, for a panel titled “Driving Inclusive Health Research on a Global Scale: Using Data to Understand National Priorities and Address Critical Gaps in Women’s Health.”

The session will look at the health priorities countries are focusing on today and how data can be used to identify gaps in women’s health that remain overlooked.

Greenway and Mehra will take part in a panel titled “Empowering Workforces Through Women’s Health,” in which corporate health leaders discuss women’s health priorities from both employee and employer perspectives, and which benefits organisations should be prioritising.

The full agenda is now available, and registration is open.

Peers have called for law reform after two House of Lords debates on fertility treatment, surrogacy, embryo research and declining birthrates.

The first debate was put forward by crossbench peer Baroness Ruth Deech, who previously chaired the UK’s fertility regulator, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.

She discussed proposals from the HFEA to reform the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, along with proposals from the Scottish Law Commission and the Law Commission of England and Wales to reform the Surrogacy Arrangements Act.

She called for parliamentary scrutiny of possible changes to regulatory powers, consent rules, donor information and future scientific developments.

Baroness Deech said: “Parliament should plan by setting up a Select Committee to examine the HFEA’s proposals to expand regulatory powers, simplify consent rules, modernise donor information provisions and create a flexible framework for future scientific developments.”

Former fertility professionals were among those contributing to the debate.

Professor Lord Robert Winston, a Labour peer who founded the IVF service at Hammersmith Hospital in London, said: “Infertility is not a disease; it is actually a symptom of something wrong.”

Professor Baroness Geeta Nargund, a Labour peer, current HFEA member and former medical director of CREATE Fertility, disagreed.

She said: “Infertility is a disease, as stated by the World Health Organisation.”

Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Caroline Pidgeon highlighted regional differences in access to NHS-funded fertility treatment.

She cited figures from the Progress Educational Trust’s NHS Fertility Funding Tracker showing that only two of England’s 42 integrated care boards comply with the recently updated fertility guideline published by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.

Integrated care boards are local NHS organisations responsible for planning and funding healthcare services in their areas.

Baroness Pidgeon said many boards were offering only a partial IVF cycle rather than a full cycle as defined by NICE.

A full IVF cycle generally includes ovarian stimulation, egg collection and the transfer of all suitable fresh and frozen embryos created during treatment.

Crossbench peer Professor Baroness Clare Gerada, a former president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said: “The proportion of NHS-funded IVF cycles has fallen to just under 30 per cent, the lowest level since 2008.”

She added that, in relation to IVF, “the NHS system has collapsed”.

Liberal Democrat peer Lord Monroe Palmer said it was “very ironic that it is difficult for many patients to access publicly funded fertility treatment in the very country where IVF was originally pioneered”.

Conservative peer Edward Howard, Earl of Effingham, also raised concerns about the NICE fertility guideline.

He said: “Access remains highly variable across England, because ICBs are not required to implement that guidance.”

He described the situation as “a clear gap between guidance and enforceable entitlement”.

Baroness Deech called for “automatic record sharing between clinics and the NHS central records system”.

Baroness Nargund supported this and linked the ambition to the Single Patient Record in the government’s Ten-Year Health Plan for England and the Health Bill currently before Parliament.

Baroness Pidgeon said such ambitions were at odds with the exceptional degree of medical secrecy that currently applies to IVF.

She also pointed to “a clear desire for the HFEA to be able to permit patients to give generic consent for the use of their embryos in research”.

Patients cannot currently give broad consent for unspecified future research involving their embryos.

Responding for the government, Labour peer Baroness Judith Blake said “immediate legislative reform” was not possible because “the legislative programme for this Parliamentary session is very full”.

Baroness Deech replied: “It might well take some years, but the Government really needs to set up that Select Committee and do the legislative scrutiny right now.”

A second debate on related issues followed immediately afterwards.

Baroness Nargund asked the government “what assessment they have made of the UK’s declining birthrates in an ageing population”.

She also said: “We still have a postcode lottery for IVF provision, with nearly 70 per cent of ICBs funding only one cycle of treatment.”

Responding for the government, Labour peer Lord Philip Wilson said: “The Government are committed to improving fair and equitable access to fertility services, recognising the significant emotional and health impacts of infertility.”