An unending commitment to address women’s health across their entire lives, conference marks 25 years
The Health of Women 2025 conference returns with first in-person events since the COVID-19 pandemic.
April 03, 2025
Organizers say the conference highlights how a team-based approach often produces the best results for education, research, and patient care. (VCU Institute of Women’s Health)
By Pete Woody
For 25 years and in various formats and locations, the Health of Women conference has advanced the trailblazing work of the VCU Institute for Women’s Health for a broad audience of health care providers.
With this year’s conference set for May 2, the organizers are excited to bring the conference back as an in-person event after it was held virtually for the past several years.
Filled with engaging lectures and discussions, Health of Women 2025 will once again follow a well-established and successful approach of addressing women's health across their lifespan by catering to the learning needs of a diverse group of providers in a wide variety of specialties, including heart health, breast health, diabetes, bone health, hormone therapy, cervical cancer, and pregnancy, to name a few.
The event not only provides great learning opportunities to enhance the care of women patients, but it also highlights the prominent role that Virginia Commonwealth University and VCU Health have in the field of women’s health.
“The conference has focused a very wonderful bright light on VCU as a leader in women’s health for many years,” said Wendy S. Klein, MD, MACP, a co-chair of the conference. “People usually come back year after year.”
Klein, her fellow co-chair Lisa Ellis, M.D., MACP, and Susan Kornstein, M.D., executive director of the VCU Institute of Women’s Health, which organizes the conference, all say their commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to women’s health across the lifespan is what underpins their work overall as well as the goals of the conference.
“Good health care is interdisciplinary, especially women's health,” Klein said. “We teach medicine from a team standpoint. We round as a team. We need to be educating people in the same manner and supporting that team approach.”
“We've been a national leader in women's health for many decades,” added Kornstein. “And an interdisciplinary approach to women's health is best for both clinical care and for research.”
Addressing gaps in knowledge and research
Though Klein and Kornstein have been working together on the conference for 25 years, their professional relationship at VCU goes back further to when they first met in 1989. One of their earliest collaborations was opening a small multidisciplinary health clinic that focused on internal medicine and psychiatry. Through their work, they hoped to address what they saw as a knowledge gap in terms of research on women’s health issues as well as best practices for treatment of these issues.
“We all went to medical school at a time when there were very few women in medicine. Only about 10 percent of my medical class were women. There was no field of women's health at that time other than obstetrics and gynecology,” Kornstein said. “We now understand that women’s health encompasses all medical specialties, as we have learned that some conditions are unique to women, some are more common in women and some may be expressed differently in women and men, where women may have different symptoms or respond differently to treatments. As the number of women in medicine grew, they noted the gaps in our knowledge and became very interested in answering the question of, are we taking the best care of our women patients?”
In 1993, Kornstein, Klein, and several others co-founded the Women’s Health Center at Stony Point, which was one of the first multidisciplinary women’s health centers in an academic medical center. The concept of a clinical care center gradually broadened into the VCU Institute for Women’s Health, which was chartered in 1999 and focused on clinical care, research, education, community outreach, and leadership development.
Good health care is interdisciplinary, especially women's health. We teach medicine from a team standpoint. We round as a team. We need to be educating people in the same manner and supporting that team approach.
Wendy S. Klein, MD, MACP, conference co-chair
Clinical care also expanded to include a women’s health residency within VCU’s internal medicine program. Kornstein and Klein met Ellis when she was part of this program, after graduating from VCU School of Medicine. Ellis later became the director of the Women’s Health Center at Stony Point, leading the development of programs and services that capitalized on the pillars of women’s health. These are led by highly specialized experts with national and international reputations for excellence and a sole focus on women and their unique health concerns.
The Institute for Women’s Health received a designation as a National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and today it has more than 170 affiliate faculty representing 15 schools and 46 departments across VCU.
For Ellis, the research results are what help push their work forward. “There's nothing that speaks better than data,” she said. “And that's why this is such important work.”
A platform for education and training
Kornstein also notes that the Institute’s education and research efforts are enhanced because of its reach across VCU and VCU Health, which brings many benefits. “The whole idea of the Institute is to get people out of the silos of their departments and schools and have them work together to improve women’s health.”
One example where research has led to innovations in care for women, as well as men, is heart disease, Klein said.
“Women have more microvascular disease, while men have more macrovascular disease, or large vessel disease. Diagnosing that is different in men compared to women and we have learned a great deal about this in the last few decades, which has improved our care of both men and women,” Klein said.
Creating the Health of Women conference provided a much larger platform to share this knowledge.
“We have nationally recognized cardiologists come and speak to our audience and attendees will come up afterwards and say, why have I never heard this before?” Klein said. “That is what drives us to do this. That's just one example. There are many.”
With the education and training aspects in mind, Health of Women 2025 organizers also partnered with VCU Health Continuing Education to ensure that continuing education credits are available to conference attendees. That aspect, combined with an agenda featuring renowned speakers as well as VCU Health experts, presents a great learning opportunity for all who attend.
Klein said this scope of the conference is an extension of the organizers’ belief that a collaborative, team-based approach to health care often produces the best results, whether that is for education, research, or patient care.
“We do know that when you bring it together and take an integrated holistic approach, you get better outcomes.”
