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Medicines360 Celebrates National Women’s Health Week

Reflecting on recent progress accelerating access to improved health for all women

Each year, our nation marks National Women’s Health Week to lift up every woman’s right to live her healthiest life. At the core of this annual observance is a call to action in the continued fight to ensure all women get the care they deserve. The theme of this year’s National Women’s Health Week is dedicated to shining a light on health issues unique to women and empowering them to take charge of their health journeys. At Medicines360, we believe truly meeting that goal requires tackling barriers in access to women’s health and prioritizing health for all women.

As we continue to pursue a healthier future, we see hope all around us. Incredible progress is being made on all fronts, and we recognize that it is crucial to take the time to celebrate these advancements along the way. That’s why, to mark National Women’s Health Week, we want to reflect on how some recent federal and legislative actions — alongside our own work — are breaking down barriers to health access through public-private partnerships.

ARPA-H HEROES Program Proposer’s Day and the Sprint for Women’s Health

In February, Medicines360 Executive Vice President Autumn Ehnow was selected to be one of just 16 speakers at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Health Care Rewards to Achieve Improved Outcomes (HEROES) Program Proposer’s Day, where she presented on Medicines360’s impact to date, providing nearly 1.5 million women with an affordable hormonal IUD for long-acting, reversible contraception, and our expansion into maternal health, an area aligned with the HEROES Program.

Later that month, the First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden, announced the ARPA-H Sprint for Women’s Health, which commits $100 million to women’s health research and development, aiming to help fill the gaps that allow so many women to go misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. This transformational investment will work to drive women’s health innovation, and marks the first major deliverable of Dr. Biden’s landmark White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research.

Celebrating Women’s History Month with a Historic White House Event

In March, Ehnow attended a White House celebration of Women’s History Month, where she applauded alongside other incredible women leaders as President Biden signed an Executive Order (EO) to advance women’s health research and innovation. In her remarks, First Lady Dr. Biden underscored the importance of addressing women’s underrepresentation in health research. At Medicines360, we are extraordinarily grateful for the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic call to invest in, prioritize, and expand women’s health research and innovation.

President Biden announced his Executive Order alongside a set of over 20 new federal actions and commitments on March 18. Some highlights from the Executive Order include:

  • Prioritizing Investments in Women’s Health: the EO directs the White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research constituent agencies to prioritize women’s health research funding and encourage women’s health innovation including through ARPA-H and multi-agency initiatives such as the Small Business Innovation Research Program and the Small Business Technology Transfer Program.
  • Integrating Women’s Health Across the Federal Research Portfolio: the EO directs Initiative’s constituent agencies to develop and strengthen research and data standards on women’s health across all relevant research and funding opportunities.
  • Assessing Unmet Needs to Support Women’s Health Research: the EO directs the Office of Management and Budget and the Gender Policy Council to lead a robust assessment of gaps in federal funding for women’s health research and identify changes needed to maximally support the broad scope of women’s health research across the federal government.

Some highlights from the federal actions and commitments announced alongside the EO include:

  • The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will launch an NIH-wide effort to close gaps in women’s health research across the lifespan.
  • The Food and Drug Administration plans to issue industry guidance relating to the inclusion of women in clinical trials and to conduct outreach to stakeholders to discuss opportunities to advance women’s health across the lifespan.
  • NIH will launch a Pathways to Prevention series on menopause and menopausal symptoms to identify gaps in existing research and develop a roadmap that can be used to help guide the field forward.
  • The US Department of Agriculture will fund research to help identify early warning signs of maternal morbidity and mortality in women who are a part of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program.

Medicines360’s 15-year track record of innovating in women’s health could be accelerated with these actions. We applaud the work of the Administration and look to partner with the government and others as we collectively come together to improve women’s health across America.

New Global Partnership

While much of the progress described here focuses on women living within the US, Medicines360 is also working hard to ensure that women across the globe get better access to the care they need. We were proud to announce a new partnership earlier this year with DKT WomanCare, an organization helping increase availability and use of reproductive health products. Through this alliance, Medicines360 is continuing its global work to expand access to our hormonal IUD AVIBELA. Together, Medicines360 and DKT WomanCare are working to increase awareness of AVIBELA, build markets, and ensure broader access across the public and private sectors in countries across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean.

Looking Forward

We are so proud at Medicines360 to be a part of the communities working to improve the lives and health of all women. We are thankful for our partners and to everyone who supports our mission of accelerating access to new health innovations for women everywhere.

Contact:

Heidi Glasser
Medicines360
415-951-8700
hglasser@medicines360.org

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About Medicines360

Located in San Francisco, California, Medicines360 is a global nonprofit pharmaceutical organization with a mission to accelerate the timeline from health innovation to access for all women. Medicines360 is committed to working with healthcare providers, advocacy groups, and patients to deliver innovative and meaningful treatments that help women around the world have greater access to the medicines they need. For more information, visit www.medicines360.org.

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©2022 Medicines360. A 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Medicines360® and its design are registered trademarks of Medicines360. 

Avibela® is a registered trademark of Medicines360 in countries across Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean.

Impact RH360® is a registered trademark of Medicines360 in Madagascar, Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa, and Zambia.

All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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AVIBELA can be made available in the following 88 countries

  1. Algeria
  2. Angola
  3. Bangladesh
  4. Belize
  5. Benin
  6. Bhutan
  7. Botswana
  8. Burkina Faso
  9. Burundi
  10. Cambodia
  11. Cameroon
  12. Cape Verde
  13. Central African Republic
  14. Chad
  15. Comoros
  16. Costa Rica
  17. Cuba
  18. Democratic Republic of the Congo
  19. Djibouti
  20. Dominica
  21. Dominican Republic
  22. Egypt
  23. El Salvador
  24. Equatorial Guinea
  25. Eritrea
  26. Ethiopia
  27. Gabon
  28. Ghana
  29. Grenada
  30. Guatemala
  31. Guinea
  32. Guinea-Bissau
  33. Haiti
  34. Honduras
  35. India
  36. Indonesia
  37. Ivory Coast
  38. Jamaica
  39. Kenya
  40. Lao PDR
  41. Lesotho
  42. Liberia
  43. Libya
  44. Madagascar
  45. Malawi
  46. Malaysia
  47. Maldives
  48. Mali
  49. Mauritania
  50. Mauritius
  51. Mayotte
  52. Morocco
  53. Mozambique
  54. Myanmar
  55. Namibia
  56. Nepal
  57. Nicaragua
  58. Niger
  59. Nigeria
  60. Pakistan
  61. Panama
  62. Papua New Guinea
  63. Philippines
  64. Republic of the Congo
  65. Rwanda
  66. Sao Tome and Principe
  67. Senegal
  68. Seychelles
  69. Sierra Leone
  70. Somalia
  71. South Africa
  72. South Sudan
  73. Sri Lanka
  74. Kitts and Nevis
  75. Lucia
  76. Vincent & the Grenadines
  77. Sudan
  78. Swaziland
  79. Tanzania
  80. Thailand
  81. The Gambia
  82. Timor-Leste
  83. Togo
  84. Tunisia
  85. Uganda
  86. Vietnam
  87. Zambia
  88. Sri Lanka

Tina Raine-Bennett, MD, MPH, FACOG

Chief Executive Officer

Tina Raine-Bennett, MD, MPH, is CEO of Medicines360. Previously, she served as a senior research scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research and the research director of the Women’s Health Research Institute. She is a Board-Certified Obstetrician Gynecologist who received her medical training at the University of California, San Diego, and post-graduate residency training and MPH at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she also completed a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Fellowship. She was also senior staff physician at Kaiser Permanente and has a special interest in family planning and adolescent reproductive health.

As the director of the Women’s Health Research Institute, Dr. Raine-Bennett focused on expanding research on women’s health within the Division and translating women’s health research into clinical practice and policy within the Ob/Gyn departments in Northern California. She also promoted the involvement of clinicians in research designed to improve the health outcomes and healthcare experiences of women at Kaiser Permanente and women in general.

Prior to Kaiser Permanente, Dr. Raine-Bennett was a professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She was based at San Francisco General Hospital where she was also the medical director of the New Generation Health Center, a UCSF affiliate site that provides community-based reproductive health services. Dr. Raine-Bennett’s research has focused on contraceptive methods and on elucidating factors that influence contraceptive choice and continuation, and she was principal investigator on NIH grants to assess hormonal contraceptive use predictors and develop interventions to improve contraceptive access.

Her past and current research on emergency contraception has focused on the safety of making emergency contraception more accessible and she conducted a pivotal clinical trial to make emergency contraception available to teens without a prescription. She served on the editorial board of Obstetrics and Gynecology and has over 100 peer-reviewed publications. She was the Treasurer of the Board of Directors for the Society of Family Planning and Society of Family Planning Research Fund. She has also served as an examiner for the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and on national committees for the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the National Medical Board of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.