New reporting tool targets maternal-fetal teams as pregnancy complexity rises
By Dr Fran Conti-Ramsden, clinician at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, academic at King’s College London, and chief medical officer of MEGI Health.
A woman gives birth. A few days later she goes home, often with a bag of medication for her blood pressure, and then, very often, very little structured follow-up for her heart (cardiovascular) health.
In my clinical work, and through our collaboration with Action on Pre-eclampsia, I see and hear about this postnatal cliff edge again and again, and it still shocks me.
We invest a lot of medical care and attention whilst a woman or birthing individual is pregnant, then, at the very moment emerging evidence suggests we have a window of opportunity to modify long-term health, the support falls away.
That cliff edge is a symptom of a deeper issue: we have come to treat “women’s health” as a synonym for reproductive health. Pregnancy, periods and fertility, important as they are, have crowded out everything else.
Yet the conditions that do most to shorten and limit women’s lives are not reproductive at all.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in women worldwide, and it is still too readily thought of as a man’s problem.
Heart disease in women is more likely to be missed and under-treated, in part because for decades women were under-represented in the research that built our knowledge.
Pregnancy makes this vivid.
Conditions such as pre-eclampsia are not only risks to be managed for nine months; they are early warnings about a woman’s future, markers that she is more likely to develop heart disease and high blood pressure in the years to come.
We have the knowledge to act on that. What we mostly do instead is discharge her and look away.
This is exactly the kind of problem better tools should help us solve: spotting risk earlier, supporting women and their clinicians through the vulnerable postnatal window, and providing continuity where the system currently provides a drop due to lack of capacity.
Artificial intelligence and digital health have real potential here; in risk prediction, in monitoring blood pressure at home, and in helping stretched clinicians know who needs attention and when.
And yet this is not where most of the energy is going.
It is far easier to build, fund and scale an app that tracks a cycle than a tool that changes the trajectory of a woman’s heart.
So, innovation clusters at the lighter, lower-risk end of innovation, while the conditions that actually kill and disable women, and moments like the postnatal cliff, stay under-served.
Closing the women’s health gap could add at least a trillion dollars to the global economy each year, the World Economic Forum estimates, but the bigger prize is women living longer, healthier lives.
None of this means technology is a cure in itself. It is a tool, and a tool built carelessly can do harm.
Because women have been under-represented in medical data, systems trained on that data can quietly carry the same blind spots forward, deepening inequalities rather than closing them.
Responsible innovation, with clinical-grade evidence, privacy and equity designed in from the start, and tools built around real clinical pathways rather than bolted on afterwards, is not a brake on progress.
It is the only version of progress worth having.
I am optimistic, because a serious community is forming around exactly these questions and the appetite to get it right is real.
It is why, at MEGI, we are bringing clinicians, researchers, founders, regulators and investors together for our AI × Women’s Health summit on 25 June.
If we keep our focus on the conditions that matter most to women’s lives, and build the tools to meet them responsibly, the postnatal cliff edge could become something else entirely: the moment the system finally catches her and delivers preventative healthcare.
AI × Women’s Health: Innovation, Challenges and Opportunities summit is taking place on Thursday 25 June 2026 at the London Institute for Healthcare Engineering. The event is free and is fully booked and operating a waiting list. Join the waiting list here.
About Dr Fran Conti-Ramsden
Dr Fran Conti-Ramsden is a UK Obstetrics and Gynaecology registrar and Chadburn Clinical Lecturer at KCL passionate about transforming women’s health through technology and innovation.
Combining NHS clinical experience with an MRC-funded PhD, recent NHS Clinical AI fellowship and commercial role as Chief Medical Officer at Megi health, she works at the intersection of clinical medicine, data science, technology and AI.
Her current programme of research focuses on the intersection of healthcare and technology; leveraging advances such as smartphone based vital signs capture and large language models to drive forward scalable innovation in maternal cardiovascular care.
She has published over 20 peer-reviewed manuscripts (See gScholar, h-index 12), including award-winning work recognized by Hypertension Journal.
She was awarded an AI visionary award in 2025 by Health Innovation KSS was the recipient of the 2024 International Society for the Study of Hypertension in Pregnancy Zuspan prize.
