The Women’s Health Diagnostics Gap: A Crisis of Interpretation, Not Just Access

The prevailing narrative surrounding the women’s health diagnostics gap often centers on the idea that women simply aren’t getting tested. However, a deeper look, supported by millions of lab results, reveals a more nuanced and concerning truth: the tests are frequently ordered, but the crucial piece of interpretation—the connection between long-standing symptoms and what the results truly signify—is often missing. This oversight leaves countless women navigating a healthcare system that fails to adequately address their unique physiological complexities.

Consider the experience of Kim Trowbridge, a retired environmental consultant from Cleveland and a member of Function, a preventive health testing company. For years, Trowbridge’s concerns about broken sleep, inexplicable weight shifts, and climbing cholesterol levels were routinely attributed to menopause by her healthcare providers. Despite undergoing standard diagnostic panels, no one delved deeper into the underlying causes. It wasn’t until she proactively sought out Function’s comprehensive testing that the true picture emerged: 10 of her 13 cardiovascular markers were out of range, including elevated Lp(a) and hs-CRP, despite no family history of heart disease. "People are going around the traditional medical system because it’s not serving them," Trowbridge explains, articulating a sentiment shared by many who feel unheard and undiagnosed.

This pattern of dismissal and misinterpretation is not an isolated incident but rather a systemic issue, one that Function, with its database of 100 million lab results and a membership base that is over half women, is actively bringing to light. The company’s co-founder, Pranitha Patil, embodies this very struggle, having experienced firsthand how the medical system can fail to translate lab numbers into meaningful health insights.

Patil’s own journey began in her teenage years, grappling with symptoms that would later be understood as polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS), alongside prediabetes and alarmingly high cholesterol levels exceeding 250. When asked what the traditional system failed to provide her, Patil’s response was definitive: not a missing test, nor an unexplained result. "It was that the symptoms, like showing up in me as a young female, were not necessarily taken seriously," she corrected. Her age made her seem "too young" for statins, and her prediabetes didn’t conform to typical visual indicators, leading to its dismissal. The prevailing solution offered for her other issues was birth control—a common, albeit often superficial, catch-all of the era. At just 20, she was told to prepare for a lifetime on medication, a prognosis that spurred her to embark on a journey of self-experimentation and advocacy.

The medical community has since validated Patil’s experience in a profoundly significant way. On May 12, 2026, a coalition of 56 patient and professional organizations formally renamed polycystic ovary syndrome to polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS. This renaming was a critical acknowledgment that the previous nomenclature, by focusing solely on "ovarian cysts" that are not pathological but rather follicles, obscured the condition’s profound endocrine and metabolic reality. This narrow framing contributed to diagnostic delays affecting up to 70% of patients, preventing a holistic understanding of the condition. Patil’s elevated cholesterol and prediabetes, once treated as unrelated complications, were in fact integral components of her PMOS, filed under a name that misleadingly pointed only to her ovaries.

The echoes of Patil’s experience resonate through the stories of many Function members, including Holly Strickland, a 34-year-old emergency room nurse and mother of two in Houston. For over a decade, Strickland endured debilitating exhaustion, attributing it to the demands of school, then pregnancy, then fluctuating hormones. She coped by relying on caffeine to power through her shifts and napping whenever possible to survive. Function’s comprehensive diagnostic panel, however, revealed a stark truth: her thyroid antibodies were approximately 75 times the normal range, leading to a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. "I spent over a decade being told I was fine when I wasn’t," Strickland lamented, highlighting the profound irony of working within the very system that failed to provide her with answers.

This raises an obvious question: if these vital tests exist and are often covered by insurance when ordered by a doctor, why are women like Trowbridge and Strickland paying $365 annually out of pocket for Function’s services? Patil offers a compelling counter-argument. She contends that many of these comprehensive panels are not genuinely covered by insurance because they require specific diagnostic codes that patients often do not possess. Consequently, the financial burden still falls on the patient. More critically, Patil emphasizes a barrier upstream of billing: the patient’s inherent lack of knowledge. "You, as a patient, may not know what to ask for," she observes. "How are we to expect the average American on the street to know what to ask for or to know how to communicate" within a hierarchical and often intimidating medical system? In her view, Function doesn’t expose a mere gap in testing, but rather fundamental flaws in "the how in which the system was built."

The translation gap often begins even before a patient steps into an appointment, as many women, accustomed to having their concerns minimized, dismiss their own symptoms. Jennifer, another Function member and nurse who preferred her last name be withheld, experienced this self-dismissal for about a year as she grappled with hair loss and persistent fatigue at age 37. Her Function lab results revealed a ferritin level of a critically low 5 ng/mL, a finding so significant that her doctor immediately recommended a colonoscopy, far earlier than the standard screening age. "Without those labs, I would have dismissed my symptoms, and I would have never gotten this colonoscopy," Jennifer stated, underscoring how objective data can empower patients to pursue necessary investigations that might otherwise be overlooked.

Function’s extensive dataset, particularly regarding its majority female membership, has yielded several significant patterns that challenge conventional medical wisdom. Since its inception, Function’s base membership has included comprehensive markers for reproductive and hormonal health, such as AMH, estradiol, FSH, LH, prolactin, SHBG, and testosterone—markers historically omitted from routine physicals. At scale, three distinct trends emerge:

First, approximately 15% of women tested by Function showed elevated thyroid antibodies despite having normal TSH levels. This means that a standard thyroid screen, which typically only measures TSH, would have cleared these women, leaving their underlying autoimmune condition undiagnosed and untreated.

Second, Function’s data indicates that FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) levels doubled between members’ 20s and 30s. This finding strongly suggests that perimenopause, the transitional phase leading to menopause, may begin significantly earlier than clinical convention currently assumes, necessitating earlier awareness and intervention strategies.

Third, seven percent of Function members presented with a combination of elevated hs-CRP (a marker of inflammation), Lp(a) (a genetic marker for cardiovascular disease), and LDL cholesterol. This trifecta significantly compounds cardiovascular risk, a concern particularly pronounced in women, who are often misdiagnosed or experience different symptoms during cardiac events.

Patil sees a unifying narrative across these findings. "Folks are coming in with abnormal or sub-optimal biomarkers while they’re being told that everything is normal when they’re feeling unwell," she noted. She draws a parallel to the well-documented fact that women present differently during heart attacks, urging us to "imagine the things we don’t know" when applying this principle to the vast areas of medicine that have historically excluded women from research.

While Function’s insights are compelling, Patil is transparent that the company is not yet producing peer-reviewed research or white papers. This is an ambition, not a current practice, as the company recognizes the need for more years of longitudinal data before it can definitively establish causality. This ambition, however, is rapidly taking shape. In August, Function announced a significant research partnership with NYU Grossman School of Medicine. This collaboration aims to leverage Function’s extensive longitudinal data to build advanced early-detection models, with a specific focus on cancer, brain health, and cardiometabolic risk, with a commitment to peer-reviewed publication of their findings.

The launch of Function’s Medical Intelligence Lab, supported by a $298 million Series B funding round and an additional $450 million in non-dilutive growth financing from General Catalyst, underscores its commitment to innovation. However, this venture into AI also confronts a critical challenge: medical artificial intelligence is trained on a vast literature base that historically excluded women for decades. Building AI on such biased data risks automating and perpetuating the very dismissals women have long faced. Patil readily acknowledges this inherent limitation: "The AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on," she conceded, recognizing that "we know that women were not included in research for so many years."

Function’s innovative workaround addresses this bias directly. Rather than chasing a generalized population average, the company’s AI bets on an individual’s own historical data as the most relevant reference point. "This is the best comparison set, not on average a female," Patil explained. To further empower patients, Function provides connectors that allow members to push their personalized results into popular AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Perplexity. This functionality ensures that AI-generated health answers reflect their unique biology rather than generic, population-level generalizations. While acknowledging the current limitations—a personal baseline can indicate change but not necessarily abnormality without established reference ranges from comprehensive research—Patil remains optimistic, viewing this period as one of "running experiments on ourselves until this is like formally complete," a horizon she places at five to ten years.

Despite being functionally one of the country’s largest women’s diagnostics platforms, Function deliberately refuses to adopt the "women’s health company" label. Patil insists this is not a strategic maneuver but a deeply held belief. "We genuinely believe that Function is meant for all, and we happen to attract women," she asserted. Naming it a women’s health company, she argues, would artificially compartmentalize and diminish half of what human health truly encompasses. She points out that fertility, for instance, is not solely one person’s project, nor are the myriad other health dynamics within a family.

Patil’s argument extends beyond mere positioning: "Women’s health is a core part of understanding human health. It’s not a separate category, it never has been." The uncomfortable truth, she suggests, is revealed by the market itself. If a platform designed for everyone predominantly attracts women, it signals a profound, unmet need within the broader healthcare system. "We’re so dismissed, there’s not enough research, we’re like the center of so many households," Patil stated, encapsulating the complex web of factors contributing to this disparity. Holly Strickland succinctly echoes this sentiment, observing that "So many women think they’re dealing with depression or anxiety when it could be their thyroid." The collective experience of Function’s members underscores an urgent call for a paradigm shift in healthcare, one that moves beyond mere testing to truly understanding and interpreting the complex biological narratives of all individuals, especially women.