The women’s health diagnostics gap isn’t a missing test. It’s a missing piece of interpretation, the one that connects symptoms a woman has lived with for years to what her results were saying all along.
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Kim Trowbridge spent years hearing that her broken sleep, shifting weight, and climbing cholesterol were just menopause. A Function member and retired environmental consultant from Cleveland kept getting standard panels. Nobody went deeper. When she finally pushed and joined Function, 10 of her 13 cardiovascular markers came back out of range, including elevated Lp(a) and hs-CRP, with no family history of heart disease.
“People are going around the traditional medical system because it’s not serving them,” she explains.
The women’s health diagnostics gap is almost always described the same way: Women don’t get tested. That framing is incomplete, and the company sitting on 100 million lab results has the receipts. More than half of Function’s members are women, and its co-founder’s history points to something less convenient than missed tests. The blood got drawn. The numbers came back. Nobody translated them.
The Tests Were Ordered, The Symptoms Were Not Believed
Pranitha Patil, co-founder and chief business officer of Function. Dismissed as a teenager despite abnormal labs, she now helps run a preventive health testing company whose members are majority women.
Function is a preventive health testing company. Members pay $365 a year for 160+ lab tests spanning hormones, thyroid, heart and cancer signals. Image courtesy of Function.
Pranitha Patil, Function’s co-founder and chief business officer, was a teenager with three things happening at once: symptoms of what was then called PCOS and now called PMOS, prediabetes, and total cholesterol north of 250. I asked what the system failed to give her. A test never ordered? A result never explained?
Neither, she corrected me. “It wasn’t actually that the tests weren’t given to me,” Patil said. “It was that the symptoms, like showing up in me as a young female, were not necessarily taken seriously.”
She was too young for statins. Her prediabetes didn’t show up in her body weight, so it didn’t look like prediabetes. The answer to the rest was birth control, which she describes as the catch-all of the era. At 20, she recalls a physician telling her she would be on medication for the rest of her life and should get prepared for it. She started running experiments on herself instead.
A Name That Hid The Whole Condition
Medicine has since conceded her point in the most literal way available. On May 12, 2026, a coalition of 56 patient and professional organizations renamed polycystic ovary syndrome polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS.
The old name implied ovarian cysts that aren’t pathological cysts at all, obscured the condition’s endocrine and metabolic reality, and contributed to diagnostic delays affecting up to 70% of patients. Patil’s cholesterol and prediabetes weren’t unrelated complications. They were the condition, filed under a name that pointed everyone to her ovaries.
Fifteen years later, Holly Strickland’s version is nearly identical. A Function member and 34-year-old emergency room nurse and mother of two in Houston, she spent more than a decade exhausted, blaming school, then pregnancy, then hormones, caffeinating through shifts, and napping to survive. Function’s diagnostic panel flagged thyroid antibodies that the company reports were roughly 75 times the normal range. The diagnosis was Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.
“I spent over a decade being told I was fine when I wasn’t,” she said. She works inside the system that couldn’t answer her.
Knowing What To Ask For Is The Real Barrier
This dashboard shows 147 biomarkers, 16 of them out of range and five improving since the last draw. Function members complete 160+ lab tests a year across two visits, and because many biomarkers are retested at the mid-year draw, the platform displays each one once and tracks how it moves over time.
Function is a preventive health testing company. Members pay $365 a year for 160+ lab tests spanning hormones, thyroid, heart and cancer signals. Image courtesy of Function.
The obvious objection: If these tests exist and insurance covers them when a doctor orders them, why are women paying $365 a year out of pocket?
Patil rejects the premise. Many of these panels aren’t actually covered, she argues, because they require diagnostic codes patients don’t have, and the bill still lands on the patient. Her sharper point sits upstream of billing. “You, as a patient, may not know what to ask for,” she observed. “How are we to expect the average American on the street to know what to ask for or to know how to communicate” inside a system she calls hierarchical and intimidating to push back against.
What Function exposes, in her telling, isn’t a missing test. It’s “the how in which the system was built.”
When Patients Dismiss Themselves
The translation gap starts before the appointment. Jennifer, another Function member and nurse who asked that her last name not be used, spent about a year having her hair loss and fatigue dismissed at 37. Her ferritin came back at 5 ng/mL, low enough that her doctor sent her for a colonoscopy well ahead of the standard screening age. “Without those labs, I would have dismissed my symptoms, and I would have never gotten this colonoscopy,” she said.
What Function’s Own Data Shows About Women
Function’s base membership has included AMH, estradiol, FSH, LH, prolactin, SHBG and testosterone since launch, markers routine physicals have historically skipped. At scale, three patterns stand out.
About 15% of women tested showed elevated thyroid antibodies despite normal TSH, meaning a standard thyroid screen would clear them.
FSH levels doubled between members’ 20s and 30s, suggesting perimenopause may begin earlier than clinical convention assumes.
Seven percent of members showed elevated hs-CRP, Lp(a), and LDL cholesterol together, a combination that compounds cardiovascular risk, particularly in women.
Patil sees one story running through it all. “Folks are coming in with abnormal or sub-optimal biomarkers while they’re being told that everything is normal when they’re feeling unwell,” she noted. Women are known to present differently during heart attacks. Apply that to everything medicine hasn’t studied, she added, and “imagine the things we don’t know.”
None Of It Is Published Yet
Asked whether Function is producing peer-reviewed research or white papers on these findings, Patil was straight: it’s an ambition, not a practice. The company needs more years of longitudinal data before it can claim one thing causes another. That ambition has since acquired an address. In August, Function announced a research partnership with NYU Grossman School of Medicine to build early-detection models from its longitudinal data, with peer-reviewed publication promised. The stated agenda names cancer, brain health and cardiometabolic risk.
Building AI On Research That Left Women Out
Function launched its Medical Intelligence Lab alongside a $298 million Series B and has since raised another $450 million from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, a non-dilutive, growth-financing vehicle designed to finance sales and marketing. Here’s the trap. Medical AI learns from a literature base that excluded women for decades, so building on it automates the dismissal.
Patil knows. “The AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on,” she acknowledged, and “we know that women were not included in research for so many years.”
Her workaround is genuinely interesting. Rather than chase a better population average, Function bets on your own history as the reference point. “This is the best comparison set, not on average a female,” she explained.
The company’s connectors let members push their results into ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Perplexity so answers reflect their biology instead of generic data. More than 200 million people ask AI a health question weekly, and most answers come from population-level generalizations.
The limit is real, and she doesn’t hide it. A personal baseline tells you what changed. It can’t tell you what’s abnormal without reference ranges drawn from the same thin research. “We’re running experiments on ourselves until this is like formally complete,” Patil conceded, putting the horizon at five to 10 years.
Why She Won’t Call It A Women’s Health Company
Function is functionally one of the country’s largest women’s diagnostics platforms and refuses the label.
That wasn’t strategy, Patil insists. “We genuinely believe that Function is meant for all, and we happen to attract women.” Naming it a women’s health company would cut out half of what health actually is. Fertility isn’t one person’s project, she points out, and neither is anything else that happens inside a family.
Her argument runs deeper than positioning, “Women’s health is a core part of understanding human health. It’s not a separate category, it never has been.”
Which leaves the uncomfortable math. If a platform built for everyone tips majority female, the market is telling on itself. “We’re so dismissed, there’s not enough research, we’re like the center of so many households,” Patil said.
Strickland put the same thing in fewer words, “So many women think they’re dealing with depression or anxiety when it could be their thyroid.”
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