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Everyone in women's health works in reimbursement in one way or another. While our industry is mission-driven, ultimately it's a business that has to generate a return to shareholders, to investors, or to a bootstrapped doctor or clinician operating their own practice.
Every women's health product or service gets paid for somehow. And how that product gets paid for impacts every single person reading this — regardless of your function.
I've been building in women's health since 2016, and it hasn't been until the last two years that I've noticed just how important reimbursement knowledge is — and how lacking it is. So much so that on stage last week at Women's Health Week in NYC, I used the term reimbursement literacy and it sparked more hallway conversation than I expected. Because it fits.
Let's Break It Down
Reimbursement comes from Latin bursa (purse) — it literally means to restore the equivalent of what was spent. The whole system is, fundamentally, about whose purse gets refilled, by whom, in what amounts, under what rules, after what process.
Literacy names a competency previously described only by its absence. Financial literacy. Health literacy. Digital literacy. In each case, when a domain becomes important enough that broad understanding is required for full participation, literacy is the word we reach for. Reimbursement is now that domain in women's health.
So What Is Reimbursement Literacy?
I define it as the working fluency to understand not just what is reimbursed and how, but how the system works — how coverage, payment, and coding decisions get made, and the ability to act on and explain that understanding.
We talk about the women's health gap as a research gap, a funding gap, a clinical gap. Those are all real. But underneath all of them is a reimbursement literacy gap. The ecosystem doesn't understand how coverage decisions get made, how codes get valued, or what payers actually want. This is holding us back.
It's why your OBGYN visit is usually only 7–10 minutes long — they need to see 50–60+ patients a day to keep the practice open under rates that have declined more than 10% in real dollars since 2020. The system isn't paying them to do more. That is a reimbursement problem.
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"Almost everyone working in women's health hits a reimbursement wall at some point. And almost none of them were trained for it."
— Jodi Neuhauser
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The Responsibility Is Not Just with Senior Leaders
Some of the most important decisions in women's health are being made by people who don't realize they're indirectly influenced by reimbursement. Product, clinical, BD, marketing, finance, CS, the CEO — all of them touch reimbursement, and almost none were trained in it.
That's why upleveling literacy across the whole organization is the work. The more people who understand reimbursement in women's health, the faster we go — and the faster we change it.
How Does Reimbursement Impact My Job?
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