How urinary incontinence became a real healthcare market
Virtual clinics, reimbursement pathways and changing patient behaviour are helping transform one of women’s health’s most overlooked categories into an investable healthcare sector
Several years ago, when I first saw femtech pioneer Ida Tin speak, she said something that stuck with me ‘progress can’t happen in the shadows’ - the point being, that in women’s health we first have to make something visible before it can be improved.
Pelvic health is a perfect example of this. Urinary incontinence - one of the largest and most overlooked segments within pelvic health - has existed in a strange corner of healthcare: it’s clinically common, commercially underestimated and culturally hidden in plain sight.
The numbers have always been enormous. Millions of women will experience bladder leakage, urgency and pelvic floor dysfunction, particularly after childbirth and during menopause. Some estimates cite prevalence of urinary incontinence in women as up to 60% or more.
Yet despite the scale, urinary incontinence (and more broadly pelvic health) has rarely behaved like a major healthcare market.
Then past few weeks, a flurry of activity all related to urinary incontinence:
UroMems raised $60m to advance its smart implant for stress urinary incontinence
BlueWind Medical raised $47.8m to expand commercialisation of its Revi implant for urge urinary incontinence
and Australia’s NinaMED launched with $13.75m for overactive bladder therapy.
At the same time, virtual pelvic health clinic Dry Days Health announced it had gone in-network with its first insurer, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield Maryland, expanding access to specialist-led bladder care for more than a million women across the state. Developed by Amara Therapeutics (which is also building broader digital therapeutics and pelvic health technologies), Dry Days Health is a virtual care platform designed to make specialist bladder care easier to access remotely.
Together, these developments suggest growing recognition that urinary incontinence is a major chronic health category with significant unmet need, specialist shortages and long-term quality-of-life impacts.
But - the breakthroughs we’re seeing may not simply be better devices or therapies. Something more fundamental may be shifting.
According to Brendan Staunton, CEO of Amara Therapeutics, the company behind Dry Days Health, one of the biggest barriers to innovation in pelvic health has not been technology itself, but access to care.
“Only 50% of women actually seek help due to stigma, embarrassment, lack of specialists and cost,” he said.
“Historically, many women were effectively told to live with these conditions, often in silence, despite the major impact on quality of life, mental health, intimacy, exercise, work, and social confidence,” he said.
“That mindset is changing rapidly.”
So, changing patient behaviour may help to explain why pelvic health innovation is beginning to scale in ways it struggled to for years.
But, as Brendan explains, increased demand is still not enough to transform the category. There’s another major bottleneck for innovators to overcome:
