President Joe Biden will sign an executive order Tuesday instructing federal agencies to ramp up research into women’s health, with cross-department priorities ranging from women’s midlife health conditions to explorations of how AI could be used to deliver breakthroughs.
The order, per a White House fact sheet, will “integrate women’s health across the federal research portfolio … with the goal of helping ensure that the administration is better leveraging every dollar of federal funding for health research to improve women’s health.”
It orders the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to tackle diseases and conditions more likely to occur after menopause, including rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis, by expanding its data collection efforts, exploring ways to improve care and developing new resources to guide women on prevention and treatment.
HHS, along with the National Science Foundation, will also “study ways to leverage [AI] to advance women’s health research” under a broader directive across the agencies that prioritizes funding for women’s health, according to the White House.
Further, the directives are accompanied by 23 new actions by agencies like HHS, such as a National Institutes of Health commitment to direct $200 million of the coming year’s funding into interdisciplinary women’s health research.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services committed to strengthening its review process to ensure that any new services or technologies funded by Medicare have “a sufficient base to show that they actually work in women,” the White House said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to expand fellowship training in women’s health research and build out the data and key quality measures it collects to improve reporting and create new women’s health resources for clinicians.
Other announced research commitments across the agencies will focus on areas such as maternal health, primary care and preventive services and the identification of new disease biomarkers.
The moves were highlighted by Biden in this month’s State of the Union address and are within the $12 billion of women’s health research funding outlined in the proposed budget for fiscal year 2025.
The president and First Lady Jill Biden had also launched a White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research last November, with the latter announcing last month a $100 million women’s health R&D investment by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.
"Research on women's health has been underfunded for decades, and many conditions that mostly or not, or only affect women, or affect women differently, have received little to no attention," Jill Biden said in November during a press call on the women's health research initiative. "These gaps are even greater for communities that have historically been excluded from research, including women of color and women with disabilities."
The directives outlined in Biden’s Monday order comprise “the most comprehensive set of executive actions ever taken to expand and improve research on women’s health,” the White House said in its fact sheet.