Investigating the health gap with Niketana Kannan

Dec 4, 2024

“From research to treatment options to access to services and programs, many women are overlooked and underserved because healthcare has traditionally not considered the impact of sex and gender differences.”

A woman standing and smiling in a hallway.
PhD student Niketana Kannan.

Extensive literature discusses the gender gap in women’s health care. It has been established that women’s symptoms are often ignored and they are belittled by their doctors for conditions that are often under-researched, under-diagnosed and are under treated. Niketana Kannan, a third-year PhD student with the Department of Economics, is seeking to understand the gap and discover potential interventions policymakers can use to bridge this health gap.

“My personal interest in this research topic came from hearing my family members talk about these kinds of experiences happening to them. They talked about when they went to a doctor and were told to just go take Tylenol to relieve their pain symptoms,” Kannan recalled. “Eventually, they were able to get the right diagnosis for what they needed, but it was a long and winding road to get there for them to finally find a doctor to take them seriously.” 

Improving health outcomes for women

In her research project, Kannan is focusing on the role of female physicians to see if there is potential to improve health outcomes for women if female physicians are matched to female patients.

Eventually, they were able to get the right diagnosis for what they needed, but it was a long and winding road to get there for them to finally find a doctor to take them seriously.

“In chatting with family physicians and doctors who are working in Canada right now, I learned that they also attest to the experience of the health gap,” Kannan said. “Women who come to them and talk about how previous doctors have missed or misinterpreted their symptoms as simply being something to do with anxiety or stress. So, my plan is to look at an emergency department setting and, quite literally, about what happens when a female doctor treats a female patient and then examine the adverse downstream health events, like hospitalizations, mortality, the type of treatments that they’re prescribed by the doctor. Basically, I am examining the premise of whether or not female doctors are able to treat female patients better than male doctors are simply by virtue of them under being able to understand what a woman is going through better.”

Eventually, they were able to get the right diagnosis for what they needed, but it was a long and winding road to get there for them to finally find a doctor to take them seriously.

Navigating barriers to accessing health data

It’s an ambitious project Kannan is starting relatively early in her PhD journey to give her more time to overcome barriers to accessing the data she needs.

“Health data is really difficult to get your hands on because there are a lot of confidentiality issues and many bureaucratic processes you have to go through in order to actually be able to get it,” she said. “I’m trying to get the data from an organization called ICES [Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences]. They are hub for the collection of all the health data available in Ontario. It’s a very long bureaucratic process to get access, which is why – even though this is something that I’m planning to work on for my thesis or a chapter in my dissertation – I need to start working on it now.”

Bureaucratic processes are not the only barrier to obtaining access to data in a timely fashion. The advantage for researchers in the proliferation of data collection means and methods in the private sector, is that every data point possible can be collected for future analysis outside the boundaries of research questions. It leads to greater objectivity in data collection, but it comes with a hefty price tag. It is not unusual for data access for PhD research projects to come with a $10,000 to $15,000 price tag.

Health data is really difficult to get your hands on because there are a lot of confidentiality issues and many bureaucratic processes you have to go through in order to actually be able to get it.

In making an early start, Kannan has been able to obtain her first funding boost. The Institute for Gender and the Economy (GATE) recently awarded Kannan and her research supervisor, Professor Shari Eli, $2500 to make a start on the project.

Health data is really difficult to get your hands on because there are a lot of confidentiality issues and many bureaucratic processes you have to go through in order to actually be able to get it.

“This project is very tightly aligned with our work,” said Lechin Lu, associate director of GATE. “We provide funding to encourage researchers from different disciplines who incorporate a gender and social equity lens into their research. The criteria that we look for is in the research design, in addition to how much it aligns with GATES mission and our priorities, and while it is a priority but not a condition for funding, we also look at projects that take place in a Canadian context. Patient health outcomes in Ontario is a very important topic and we want to support early career researchers like Niketana who are interested in this kind of work.”

By Kate Baggott

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