A Clinic of One’s Own — Transforming health care for older women

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Kristen Helton is on a mission to transform women’s health care. “A lot of people who think about women’s health think about fertility and maternity,” she says. “We sort of forget about women in their third act, 65 and up.”

As the CEO of Herself Health, Helton oversees four primary care clinics across the Twin Cities that cater to mature women. The clinic system addresses the unique health care needs of women aged 65 and older, prioritizing individualized attention with a holistic approach that could include fewer medications and specialists than a primary care doctor might need to resort to.

“Primary care doctors are stressed and burning out, trying to do more with fewer resources and less time,” Helton says. “If you have multiple conditions and you’re a complex patient, you do need more time with your doctor to have good, comprehensive care.” Without that time from a primary care doctor, elders can “feel both dismissed and not heard.”

Heart health is high among the clinic system’s priorities. Helton says 44 percent of women in the U.S. are living with some form of heart disease. Because heart disease presents differently in women than men, their symptoms often go unnoticed or are dismissed. Historically, clinical trials focused on men, leaving women’s diagnosis and treatment unexamined.

This gap is particularly poignant for Helton; her grandmother died of a heart attack at 49 years old because of missed warning signs. She was in the hospital when the cardiac event happened, yet her symptoms were ignored. “They didn’t believe that she was having a heart attack because she was so young,” Helton explains.

The clinic system prioritizes other serious conditions common in older women, such as high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s disease, bone health, and various cancers. “These are all things that are prevalent, or present differently in women,” Helton says. “A lot of our screenings and treatments are focused on [those] things.”

Despite the clinic’s name, Helton adds, “We’ll see all who come,” including people who don’t identify as women — as long as they are over the age of 65.

Helton describes her path to Herself Health as “nontraditional.” She first entered the biotech startup scene in the San Francisco Bay area in the late 1990s. She was fascinated by the interplay of technology and health care. After obtaining a Ph.D. in bioengineering, she developed a new generation of implantable biosensors to monitor glucose levels in diabetes patients. She later joined Amazon, where she pitched the idea of Amazon Care, a virtual and in-home care delivery service, to Jeff Bezos. That health care model has since spread across the U.S.

In 2022, Helton learned about Herself Health, which was originally funded by a New York–based venture studio. The Minnesota clinic system was established in the Highland Park neighborhood of Saint Paul in 2023, and has since expanded to Minneapolis, Crystal, and Roseville.