Addressing Intersectionality in Women's Health: An Interview With Jessica Horwitz, MPH, FNP-C

Jessica Horwitz, MPH, FNP-C, chief clinical officer at Tia Health, emphasizes the critical need for public health professionals to address the intersectionality of women's health during National Women's Health Week. This involves acknowledging the diverse experiences and unique challenges faced by women across racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and LGBTQ+ backgrounds, recognizing that health disparities often worsen at these intersections.

Horwitz advocates for a shift toward inclusive practices where the lived experiences of marginalized women are central to shaping care, fostering welcoming and affirming spaces, and ultimately lifting health outcomes for all.

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

How can public health professionals better address the intersectionality of women's health, considering the diverse experiences and unique challenges faced by women from various racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and LGBTQ+ backgrounds?

I think that there is a way that, by addressing women's health, there's a unique opportunity to address intersexuality from the very start. I think that you sort of start with 50% of the population that experiences unfortunately, a lot of discrimination and sexism, and then you sort of break down the various intersectionalities of various subgroups within this population, and the health disparities just, unfortunately, get greater and greater.

Bringing this conversation into the fold and understanding that one women's experiences is not reflective of every woman's experience and how we actually use it as a way to lift all people up as an opportunity. Women have, historically, done this and have been at the forefront of really advocating and pushing for equality across the various sectors. This is an opportunity to do that in this week.

I think for health professionals, it's not enough to just provide good care for women if you're ignoring a lot of the impacts of health that go well beyond what someone's body organs are. I think at Tia, where I work, we work incredibly hard to ensure not just access of care, but equitable care in terms of health care outcomes, and to hold ourselves to a really size standard in terms of bringing people in of diverse backgrounds. I think there's an opportunity for health professionals across the board to make sure that their spaces are welcoming and affirming and that they bring people in around the table who can actually have lived experiences to help create what those experiences look for. I alone, no one else alone, can sort of single handedly create those. You have to bring the people that are often not around the table into the table to really change outcomes across the board.

In what specific ways can Tia Health and similar telehealth platforms address existing barriers to women's health care access, such as geographical limitations, time constraints, and the need for specialized care?

Tia Health has a interesting play that we provide hybrid care. We provide really comprehensive virtual care, and then have the privilege of having clinics and some core markets to be able to bring people into in-person care when they need it. Digital health, and virtual care, has an amazing way of reaching people that have largely been ignored in the health care system before, whether that is through geography, as you mentioned, around where they live, or their health issue that they have going on that may mean that they can't find an affirming provider based on where they live.

I think that where there's an interesting way that Tia, and other players that are similar to Tia, is actually bringing coordinated care together, as opposed to continuing to fragment the system even more. For too often, women have been sort of seen as their body parts. You might see a particular player for contraception, or you might see a particular player for menopause, or a particular player for your mental health, and that sort of ignores the reality that we are the collection of all of those parts together.

Tia in particular, leans heavily into this concept of coordinated care. How do we reach people where they are and recognize that there are vast deserts when it comes to health care access? Ideally, we look to find ways to take care of a woman's mental health as well as her UTI [urinary tract infection] as well as what's going on with menopause at the same time. When you do that, the health outcomes of the experiences, both in terms of the tangible outcomes that we measure, but also just the experience of how women feel held changes across the board. I would love to see sort of more digital players lean into coordinated health care experiences that care for the whole person.