Women see five or six doctors to figure out menopause symptoms. A top Novartis exec says AI could finally connect the dots

For many women, menopause doesn’t show up as one neat diagnosis. It can mean sleep problems, joint stiffness, hot flashes, and a long trail of appointments while different doctors each see only one piece of the puzzle. Paula Schneider, CEO of the Institute Advancing Women’s Health, said Tuesday that women often end up seeing “five or six doctors” to sort out what’s going on once perimenopause and menopause begin.

Her complaint was blunt: there’s no holistic health in the system as it stands. And part of the problem starts much earlier, in medical training. Schneider said future OB-GYNs get only “about two hours, if that” of education on women’s midlife health. Her nonprofit is now working with a medical certification company to build continuing medical education for clinicians, with AI helping assemble evidence-based training.

Reshema Kemps-Polanco, Novartis US’s chief commercial officer, argued AI could help by doing something medicine still struggles with: connecting records and symptoms across specialties. Women with autoimmune conditions often get treated in isolation, she said, even when symptoms belong together. In Sjögren’s disease, one of the autoimmune conditions Novartis is working on, she said patients wait an average of four years for a diagnosis.

Kemps-Polanco said a patient may see a dermatologist, a rheumatologist, and a primary care doctor, while the records never line up. She has seen that confusion herself. In an emergency room, she typed her symptoms into an AI tool and said it helped her start a conversation, even if she could not judge how accurate the output was. That, for her, is the promise: getting to screening, treatment, diagnosis, and cure sooner.

Wendy Barnes, president and CEO of GoodRx, pushed for a harder check on the hype. New midlife health platforms, she said, should be backed by clinical evidence and still offer access to “an actual clinician,” not just software. It’s a cautious note, but a practical one. AI may help spot the pattern. Doctors still have to act on it.