Is getting FemTech into the NHS solely an NHS problem?

A new Parliamentary briefing puts some of the responsibility back on the sector

Ask a UK women’s health founder about selling into the NHS and you’ll probably hear a familiar story.

Getting an innovative product adopted can be slow, complicated and fragmented. Companies can find themselves navigating different NHS organisations, commissioning processes and technical requirements, even after they have built something that could potentially improve care.

But a new briefing from the UK Parliament offers a slightly different diagnosis of the problem.

Published last week, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) briefing looks at the evidence behind consumer FemTech, how products are regulated and what is stopping more of them being used by the NHS.

Citing the Government’s renewed Women’s Health Strategy, it says few FemTech products currently have “sufficient maturity of evidence to enable national evaluation, central funding, or supported rollout.”

In other words, while getting into the NHS may be difficult, the Government is also saying that too few products are yet giving it the evidence it needs for the NHS to buy them at scale.

The evidence problem

The briefing acknowledges many of the barriers companies regularly talk about. Developers report difficulties integrating their products with NHS digital systems, for example, while previous government work has acknowledged there is no single streamlined route for assessing digital health technologies and that adoption varies widely across the NHS.

But the report also spends considerable time examining the quality of evidence behind FemTech itself, concluding that high-quality evidence remains limited.

The briefing highlights studies based on self-reported data, populations that may not represent the women who eventually use a product, biased datasets and studies funded or conducted by the companies whose products are being evaluated.

The briefing gives the example of an NHS case study involving a pelvic-floor app, which reported how many times the app had been downloaded but did not report health outcomes.

Evidence isn’t the only concern

Clinical evidence isn’t the only issue the briefing raises. It also points to concerns around privacy, health inequalities and the censorship of women’s health companies online. Some companies shared how terms including “cervix”, “boobs”, “menopause” and “vulva” had resulted in content being restricted or shadow-banned - with some even saying investors subsequently questioned their limited social reach. In other words, the same companies being asked to build stronger evidence and sustainable businesses can also face structural barriers to reaching customers and raising capital.

There is a tension around data too. Women may turn to FemTech to fill gaps left by traditional healthcare, but that can mean sharing highly sensitive health information with commercial platforms. The briefing raises concerns about how that data is used and shared, as well as whether products built using insufficiently diverse datasets could worsen health inequalities. Previous Parliamentary work has even called for the NHS to provide not-for-profit alternatives to commercial FemTech, including period trackers.

But who pays to prove it works?

There is, however, an obvious chicken-and-egg problem since generating robust clinical evidence is expensive. Early-stage companies need capital to run studies, navigate regulation and demonstrate cost effectiveness - often before they have meaningful revenue.

The Parliamentary briefing acknowledges this too, and says that while a substantial proportion of European FemTech companies are based in the UK, stakeholders identified funding, evidence generation and regulation among the challenges facing the sector.

In fact, the briefing estimates that 32% of European FemTech startups are based in the UK and that the country’s 50 largest FemTech companies have raised £478 million between them.

Highlighting the recent growth in the sector, the briefing states that some 87% of all funding has been raised since 2020, while Flo Health alone accounts for 43% of the total. Twenty-three of those 50 companies remain at seed stage.

Is Government starting to tackle the gap?

The renewed Women’s Health Strategy announced a £1.5 million FemTech Healthcare Challenge specifically intended to help developers “generate the evidence needed to spread their products across the NHS.”

That sits alongside broader initiatives including the National HealthTech Access Programme, intended to help technologies become reimbursed and available through the NHS, and Innovator Passports, designed to reduce some of the barriers to adopting technologies that have already proved themselves.

It appears then that government policy is starting to build infrastructure intended to get companies to the point where the NHS can buy it. However, many have questioned whether £1.5 million is remotely enough to address that problem across an entire sector.

Industry stakeholders quoted in the Parliamentary briefing welcomed the funding as a useful signal, while pointing to substantially larger programmes elsewhere, including France.