Two Columbus Health Care Systems Are Making Overdue Investments in How They Serve Women

If you’re a woman, you may be surprised to learn that you are the latest trend in health care.

For decades, women have played second fiddle to men in research funding for women’s health issues and for treatment of conditions that affect women differently than men, local experts say. But earlier this year, OhioHealth announced it plans to build a huge, freestanding women’s center on its Riverside Methodist Hospital campus by 2026, focusing attention on both the inequities and inadequacies of women’s health care nationally and in Central Ohio.

“It’s overdue,” says Dr. Jason Melillo, vice president of OhioHealth’s women’s clinical services. “We need to serve women across their lifespan, all at one location. There’s a heavy focus on women of reproductive age, especially in obstetrics, and a relatively myopic view of what women’s reproductive life is, but there are very few trained specialists in midlife care for women.”

The new 188-bed center will house Riverside’s labor and delivery, neonatal intensive care unit and most gynecological and breast surgeries. Specialty clinics will include those for midlife, bone health, primary care wellness and a “fourth trimester” clinic for mothers’ needs after birth, such as postpartum depression and breastfeeding help. At nearly 590,000 square feet and eight stories high, the facility will be comparable in size to OhioHealth’s Dublin Methodist Hospital but will be more compact, Melillo says.

Kristina Stuecher, OhioHealth vice president and project executive of the center, says some female health care needs have been ignored for years. “It’s time we create a space for women to be able to take care of themselves so that they then can take care of everyone else,” she says. “When you’re post-gestational age, you fall off a cliff in terms of health care.”

One response, Melillo says, will be to seek out doctors trained in midlife care for women. Although women spend a third or more of their lives in perimenopause, menopause or postmenopause, few doctors are trained in care for hot flashes, sleep difficulties and night sweats, he says.

A related issue is the disparity between federal research spending for men and women’s health. Dr. Mark Landon, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, calls the difference “staggering.” A 2021 study published in the Journal of Women’s Health, for example, found that, for diseases that affect primarily one gender, three-fourths of the U.S. National Institutes of Health funding favored “male diseases.”

Ohio State hopes to make inroads into the issue with the Sarah Ross Soter Women’s Health Research Program, funded in May with a $15 million gift from Soter and the Soter Kay Foundation.

“This is going to be transformational,” says Dr. Tamar Gur, Ohio State associate professor of psychiatry, neuroscience, public health and obstetrics and gynecology. Her research into how stress during pregnancy affects mother and child will be funded through the research program, along with studies of new therapies for conditions that disproportionately affect women, such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, thyroid disease and autoimmune diseases. Gur says the money will jump-start critical research, help attract additional funding and encourage additional training in women’s health for student doctors.

Ohio State also is planning to expand its labor and delivery offerings when its new, 820-bed inpatient hospital tower opens in 2026, Landon says. The top three floors of the 26-story facility will house obstetrics and neonatal care, with the capability to increase deliveries from the current level of 5,000 a year to 7,000. The tower will have an expanded midwifery practice and will maintain its high-risk obstetrics unit.

Landon says Ohio State also will continue its fourth trimester program, which monitors conditions women developed during pregnancy, such as high blood pressure or gestational diabetes, which may indicate future health risks. “This is a way we can substantially improve the overall health of women,” Landon says.

As an offshoot, the university is planning long-term research of mothers with gestational diabetes and their children, since some evidence points to a risk of childhood obesity and diabetes for those offspring. Ohio State will also continue operating its outpatient women’s health center in Upper Arlington, which has physicians for primary care, sexual health, gynecology, endocrinology, menopause and other women’s conditions.

OhioHealth’s new women’s center will be the first of its kind in Central Ohio, and, Stuecher says, unique in the United States. “We’re trying to distinguish ourselves as the link between inpatient and ambulatory care, and there’s not a center in the country yet doing what we’re planning,” she says. “There are a lot of moments around a woman’s health that don’t have attention, and we’ve looked at these many pockets of care and said, ‘We need to respond.’”

Kathy Lynn Gray is a freelance writer.

This story appears in the July 2023 issue of Columbus Monthly and the Summer 2023 issue of Columbus CEO.