麦肯锡-美国卫生系统改善妇女医疗保健的500亿美元机会（英）

October 2025Healthcare PracticeThe $50 billion opportunity for US health systems to improve women’s healthcareShifting away from a sole focus on women’s reproductive health to a broader view of the health of women across the care continuum can improve women’s care outcomes—and health systems’ financial standing.by Anne Koffel, Jordan VanLare, MD, and Pooja Kumar, MD with Caroline Morgan Berchuck, MDWomen in the United States face steeper barriers to healthcare than men, causing preventable suffering and costing billions each year. The health of women—encompassing the entire care continuum and extending beyond reproductive and sexual health—represents an approximately $50 billion missed annual opportunity for health systems1 nationally. Addressing the gap in women’s healthcare requires a fundamental transformation in care delivery, with preventive care playing a pivotal role to ensure accessibility, continuity, and comprehensive care.The McKinsey Health Institute (MHI) and the World Economic Forum (WEF) have published two seminal reports on women’s health that reveal stark disparities between men and women. For example, women in the United States spend 25 percent more time in poor health than men do. Popular discourse often narrowly defines women’s health as reproductive health, but sexual and reproductive health accounts for less than 5 percent of women’s health burden. The remaining 95 percent stems from other health conditions. MHI and WEF’s most recent report provides a blueprint for closing the women’s health gap, urging clinical-care organizations2 to count, study, care for, include, and invest in women (see sidebar “Terminology used in this article”). Drawing on this research, this article lays out a win–win scenario for women and health systems by highlighting key actions that health systems can take to invest in the health of women. The first action involves ensuring women receive evidence-based preventive care, while the second focuses on reducing turnover of women providers and nurses, as retaining women clinicians is economically advantageous and gender-concordant care has the potential to improve women’s health outcomes3 by enhancing care con tinuity (see sidebar “Research methodology”). Addressing just preventive care and nurse retention represents an approximately $50 billion annual opportunity nationally. Another critical avenue to improve the health of women is to increase women’s engagement within one health system, but this cannot be summed at the national level, since one provider’s gain could be another’s loss (see sidebar “Enhancing women’s engagement is a $40 million to $150 million opportunity for a midsize health system”).1 We define “health system” as a broad, integrated network that includes clinical-care delivery, administration, support services, and often insurance or public health functions.2 We define “clinical-care organization” as any professional setting involved in providing direct patient care, for example,