Woman pinning medical device designs to board

Women’s health innovation and product development

Driving meaningful change in women’s health involves creating medical devices built on real user needs, inclusive design and considered routes to adoption. We help pharma and MedTech companies develop impactful women’s health technologies across the full spectrum of device development, creating solutions that tackle the gender health gap while meeting real market needs.

With a focus on designing user-centered technologies that improve access, experience and outcomes, we help you create solutions built to improve women’s healthcare across a range of health pathways, from diagnostics to digital health, treatment and surgical technology.

Graphic showing user-centred, inclusive, trustworthy and considerate design encircling diagnose, treatment, surgery and monitoring

Solving women’s health challenges

Innovating for women’s health requires navigating a variety of challenges, including fragmented and complex care pathways, as well as long-standing biases and gender data gaps in research and development. FemTech and health technologies have the potential to tackle the gender health gap, however these solutions must both offer exceptional design and usability, while also being commercially viable and marketable.

At Team Consulting, we help our clients design and develop solutions across the entire women’s health journey. From obstetrics, gynecology and breast health, to chronic conditions that disproportionately affect people assigned female at birth (AFAB), our dedicated, multidisciplinary team works with you to identify opportunities for innovation, de-risk development and translate ideas into viable, differentiated products.

How we help bring FemTech products to market

Understanding your users

Our experts in Front End Innovation and Human Factors combine user research, contextual enquiry, workflow analysis and experience mapping to build a holistic understanding of your target users, their environments and the wider care ecosystem. This approach helps uncover unmet needs and ensures your product fits seamlessly within clinical workflows and real-world use.

This includes identifying:

Details of the care pathway and how to navigate existing products, services and stakeholders
Key pain-points, needs and behavioral drivers
Barriers such as stigma, access and capability
Variability in user journeys across different populations
Opportunities for intervention.

Inclusive design and development

Team applies an inclusive design framework throughout your development, from early-stage innovation through to detailed design and beyond. With a commitment to challenging assumptions, designing in context and using sex-disaggregated data to inform the development, our women’s health experts ensure that your product is designed to tackle biases, close health gaps and deliver an optimized solution for all users.

As part of our process, we utilise various methods including:

Consistently challenging assumptions to reducing unconscious bias
Analytical expert reviews
Quick, iterative, early exploratory and formative studies involving real users
Clinical in-use studies

Applied behavioral science

Behavioral science involves building an in depth understanding of your users to help motivate and guide them effectively, allowing you to launch a solution that meets real user needs and stands out in the market.

Our behavior design experts apply proven techniques throughout your development to:

Translate user behaviors, motivations, expectations and needs into actionable design requirements and product strategy
Integrate behavior science principles and techniques into solutions that account for how people interact with technology day-to-day
Design interventions that influence real-world behaviors and outcomes
De-risk development through evidence-led decision-making

Business case development

Our experts ensure your women’s health innovations are supported by a robust business case. This involves translating the clinical value of your FemTech product into a clear, evidence-based commercial strategy, helping you to create a solution that meets real market needs.

Our Front End Innovation experts help you:

Evaluate and validate your ideas for portfolio expansion and strategy
Define the size of an opportunity through market segmentation and analysis
Quantify unmet need and economic burden across women’s health into clear value propositions
Model cost-effectiveness to inform a viable route to reimbursement and adoption
De-risk investment by balancing user need, clinical outcomes and commercial viability early in development.

Addressing key questions to tackle gender bias

Our teams are closely attuned to the biases and data gaps that have historically slowed women’s health innovation. We challenge assumptions and ask the right questions to help you create inclusive solutions that meet all your users’ needs. For example:

Is your data sex-disaggregated?
Are different user groups experiencing the condition or the device differently
Are there social or systemic barriers impacting usability, accessibility and adoption?
What critical data is missing that needs further research?
Are you relying on precedent instead of evidence?

Iterative product development

We adopt an iterative, evidence-driven approach to development, integrating technical, user and commercial inputs to define clear, robust requirements. From early technical de-risking through to rigorous, late-stage verification, we consistently integrate user feedback to ensure your medical device is viable, reliable and effective.

Our product development activities include:

Testing of key features against requirements
Refining requirements based on real-world evidence, not precedent
Regular research with representative user groups
Risk assessment including dFMEA and pFMEA
Mathematical modelling and simulation
Progressing engineering and device design in tandem
Device testing

What Team brings to women’s health innovations

40 years of experience developing market-leading medical products across diagnostics, drug delivery, surgical, monitoring and beyond.
An inclusive, user-centered device development framework that acknowledges data gaps and tackles bias.
Extensive knowledge of the FemTech landscape, including women’s health innovations in development and on the market.
Expertise in behaviorally-driven user research and workflow analysis to capture unmet needs in complex care pathways.

A passion and motivation to challenge the status quo and disrupt workflows, prioritizing the user experience and minimizing invasiveness.
Awareness of biases and stigmas faced by clinicians and patients across the women’s health journey, and systematic approaches to addressing them in device development.
Rigorous engineering, design and human factors development expertise, built on ISO 13485 accredited approaches.

Looking to bring your women’s health solution to market?

Whether you are exploring new opportunities or already developing a technology, we help you create innovative, differentiable and impactful solutions that improve women’s health.

Get in touch

Women’s health areas we support

Breast health

Breast health pathways from mammography and advanced imaging to surgical intervention and long-term monitoring, require innovation that enables efficient workflows, prioritizes user comfort, and optimizes precision and accuracy.

We support the development of cost-effective technologies that improve accessibility to cancer screening, enhance the patient experience, and enable more consistent, high-quality care by putting patients and clinicians at the center of our process.

Gynecology

Procedures in obstetrics and gynecology often rely on old-fashioned tools that lack careful consideration of the patient experience and comfort.

We help our clients identify opportunities to modernise interventions — developing differentiable devices that reduce invasiveness, improve usability, and better reflect the needs and expectations of users.

Chronic conditions with sex-specific considerations

Many chronic conditions, from autoimmune diseases to cardiovascular disorders, present and progress differently in women but remain under-recognised in device development.

We help teams incorporate sex-specific insights into product strategy and design, ensuring technologies are better tailored to real-world patient populations and clinical decision-making.

Reproductive health and fertility

Reproductive health pathways represent highly sensitive, emotionally complex experiences for patients navigating fertility, contraception, and hormone management.

Team supports you in the development of devices and combination products that address adherence challenges, delivering dignity and convenience with clear, supportive user experiences.

Maternal health

Maternal care suffers safety risks and disparities related to systemic biases and misconceptions.

We help you design solutions that objectively monitor and facilitate safer pregnancies and support postnatal care, improving continuity, personalisation and support across the patient journey while reducing burden on clinicians.

Human factors expert testing device with female user

From diagnostics to long-term care: advancing FemTech across the care pathway

Diagnostics

Women across a wide range of therapeutic areas such as polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), endometriosis and ovarian, cervical and breast cancer often suffer delayed diagnoses, preventing them from receiving life-changing treatment. Our diagnostics experts help you create solutions that tackle the challenges of siloed women’s healthcare pathways, providing accessible, commercially viable products that enable reliable, early detection.

With experience in optimizing breast imaging workflows, point-of-care devices and home-based solutions, we ensure your technologies are not only compliant, but meet the unique needs of patients and clinicians. With experience in optimizing breast imaging workflows, point-of-care devices and home-based solutions, we ensure your technologies are not only compliant but also meet patients’ and clinicians’ needs.

Treatment and intervention

Many treatments and out-patient procedures in women’s health, from fertility to pelvic and breast health, have a history of normalising pain and discomfort. Our FemTech experts work with you to challenge these ‘norms’ in women’s health by bringing innovative treatment solutions to market that optimise the user experience.

We take a holistic, sustainable approach to designing women’s health products that reduce invasiveness and ease patient burden. For drug delivery, we help you differentiate long-term injectable therapies, from fertility to immunology, with premium, intuitive device experiences and supporting digital solutions that improve usability and adherence.

Surgical devices

From surgical imaging to laparoscopy, our surgical technology experts develop devices that augment the performance and experience of surgeons, while optimizing patient outcomes. With proven experience across a variety of women’s health surgical tool developments, including breast and gynecological procedures, we focus on creating tools that tackle gender bias in surgical device design.

Our development process includes drawing on inclusive and sex-disaggregated data, in order to design solutions that carefully address the physiological differences of women patients, as well as women surgeons. Your development will also benefit from Team’s network of surgical innovators, allowing us to gain feedback from practising surgeons throughout the design process to de-risk your design and ensure your solution integrates seamlessly into existing clinical workflows.

Remote monitoring and well-being

With proven experience across a variety of digital health applications, our women’s health experts help you create technologies that close the gender data gap and enable more proactive, preventative care throughout women’s lives. This includes remote monitoring systems that engage women in their daily lives, empowering them with knowledge about their health while delivering actionable, trustworthy insights across reproductive health, mental health, hormone health, menopause and general well-being.

Whether you are developing a digital health app, a wearable or implantable device, our multi-disciplinary team applies bespoke behavior design frameworks to help you understand user needs and journeys, to design a FemTech solution that balances usability, reliability and clinical accuracy. We design remote monitoring systems that engage women in their daily lives, empowering them with knowledge about their health while delivering actionable, trustworthy insights across reproductive health, mental health, hormone health, menopause and general well-being.

Meet one of our women’s health experts

Lara Zaki is Women’s Health Lead at Team. As a senior consultant in Front End Innovation, she specializes in the early stages of medical device design, ensuring insights are translated into viable, needs-driven products that are informed by user experiences, clinical workflows, commercial requirements and technical feasibility. With a background in cognitive neuroscience, she drives the integration of behavioral science principles into the inclusive, user-centered design process.

View my bio