It’s Not Just a “Heavy Period”: Why We Need to Talk About Heavy Menstrual Bleeding
This blog was co-authored by Dr. Talat Uppal, Director, and Khika Withnell, Practice Manager at Women’s Health Road.
For too long, heavy menstrual bleeding (HMB) has existed in the shadows – minimised, normalised, or misunderstood. “It’s just how it is,” women are told. “Your mother had heavy periods, and she got through it. So will you.”
But here’s the truth: heavy menstrual bleeding is not just an inconvenience or a private burden- it’s a common, often overlooked medical condition with serious implications for women’s health, quality of life, and economic participation. And critically, it is treatable.
As we lead up to DevDays, we’re excited to spotlight HMB as a use case that brings together clinical need, lived experience, and the potential of interoperable digital health solutions. The Let’s Build session will show how tech, guided by real-world problems, can make a measurable difference in women’s lives.
A Hidden Epidemic
Research tells us over one in four Australian women of reproductive age, experience heavy menstrual bleeding, defined as “excessive menstrual blood loss that interferes with the physical, emotional, social and material quality of life” (RANZCOG 2018). Despite this prevalence, it often goes undiagnosed and untreated.
Why? Because what’s “normal” is relative. Most women only know their own cycle – there’s no yardstick to measure whether their experience is abnormal. They might assume that pain, fatigue, flooding through pads, or iron deficiency are just part of the package.
This normalisation is deeply cultural. Mothers pass on coping strategies instead of medical advice. Friends whisper about it but rarely seek help. And the healthcare system often misses the cues – partly because women don’t report the severity, and partly because clinicians may not ask the right questions.
The result? Missed diagnoses, unnecessary suffering, and a huge cost to individuals and society.
Listening to Women, Solving a Real Problem
The origin of this use case was simple but powerful: a clinician having seen the same story over and over again and wanting to solve a real-world patient issue. Heavy bleeding was having a massive impact on these women’s daily lives, yet there was no structured way to assess it, document it, or flag it for treatment.
The Women’s Health Road team recognised a gap. And like many great innovations, it started not with technology, but with a clinical need.
That’s where the magic happened.
As a multidisciplinary team, we had clinical expertise, operational insight, and a deep commitment to listening to women. We then connected with responsive, agile tech partners—those who understood how to use AI safely and the FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standard and how APIs could bridge data silos.
Enter our collaborators: Heidi Health AI, MediRecords, CSIRO (sparked AU), Remie Australia, Macquarie University, University of Western Sydney, CRC Digital Health and more – all working in a FHIR-enabled ecosystem.
Together, we aimed to build a workflow that made it easy for women to self-assess symptoms, easy for clinicians to flag concerns, and easy for HMB care interventions to be triggered early.
Why FHIR Matters Here
The beauty of a purposefully connected, FHIR-enabled EMR (electronic medical record) is not just that it’s digital. It’s that it’s interoperable. You can collect data in a community setting, use it in a hospital, and link it to evidence based, guideline driven, decision support tools—all without forcing women to repeat their story or miss out on early interventions.
FHIR allows us to integrate symptom checkers, blood test results, and clinical observations into a unified, patient-accessible record. More importantly, it allows us to build a system that’s learning from the women themselves. Every data point is an insight. Every interaction is a chance to refine.
This isn’t about flashy tech. It’s about compassionate, responsive multidisciplinary patient pathway-based care – delivered better because we can now track, learn, and act in real time.
From Data to Impact
So what happens when you do something about heavy menstrual bleeding?
You get fewer women presenting late with iron-deficiency anaemia. You get fewer missed workdays. You get more referrals to effective treatments, including medical therapies and minimally invasive procedures. And you get women who feel seen and heard.
This is what digital health should do: not just digitise but transform care.
And this is what DevDays is all about.
Let’s Build Something That Matters
At this DevDays Let’s Build session, we’re inviting clinicians, developers, researchers, and advocates to come together and build real-world solutions for HMB with women at the centre.
We’ll work on designing a community-facing questionnaire to raise awareness and support self-assessment, and a GP referral questionnaire to streamline pathways from primary care to specialist services.
We’ll define the terminology needed for accurate, interoperable documentation, identify gaps in FHIR and clinical vocabularies, and drive progress toward gender-inclusive digital health.
This is more than a coding exercise. It’s a movement to reclaim the narrative around menstrual health – to stop the silence and start building systems that respond.
Final Thoughts
Heavy menstrual bleeding is common. It’s serious. And it’s treatable.
But we can’t address it unless we acknowledge it. We can’t design for it unless we listen. And we can’t scale impact unless we build with interoperability and empathy at the core.
So, let’s do that – together.