Removing Hormonal Healthcare Barriers

Jenn Patterson is passionate about solving real problems, supporting women, and leading with empathy and action. She is a brand builder, operator, and co-founder of Coven Women’s Health — a virtual clinic reimagining hormonal healthcare for women in Canada. Jenn began her career in advertising, earned her MBA, and held senior roles at TD and Google. As CMO at NEXT Canada, she worked with some of the country’s most promising entrepreneurs and caught the entrepreneurial bug. After a heart-led leap into small business — helping her sister steady her café during the pandemic — Jenn felt a pull toward building something more personal and purposeful. Inspired by her own struggles with hormonal health, from debilitating migraines to PMDD and perimenopause, she partnered with OBGYN Dr. Michelle Jacobson to create Coven: a patient-first, collaborative care model that shortens the path to diagnosis and support.

1. What does innovation mean to you?

For me, I always start by asking: what do women actually need, and how can we deliver it in a way that feels simple, supportive, and intuitive?

At Coven Women’s Health, that often looks less like cutting-edge tech and more like thoughtful, patient-first design. It’s about using available tools — Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), virtual care platforms, UX, AI scribes — in creative ways to improve access and outcomes. In a system where we're constrained by infrastructure, regulation, and cost, real innovation is often about how we deliver care, not just what we deliver.

2. How are you leveraging AI in your innovation process, and what unexpected benefits or challenges have you encountered?

We’re starting to explore AI to support, not replace, our care delivery. Tools like Tali AI help our providers reduce admin time so they can focus more on patients. We’re also using generative AI tools like ChatGPT behind the scenes to help us build internal SOPs, create consistent clinical templates, and standardize workflows in a way that saves time and improves quality across the board.

The biggest challenge is integration. In Canada, our EMR systems don’t easily support third-party tools. Add privacy regulations and clinical standards, and it’s clear that adoption has to be cautious and intentional. But the benefits, especially for small, resource-constrained teams are clear. AI helps us do more with less, without compromising on care.

3. What is the biggest challenge you face when it comes to innovating?

The Canadian healthcare infrastructure. Running a regulated clinical practice means navigating EMR limitations, privacy laws, and rigid workflows. There’s very little room to build from scratch. A custom solution would easily cost over $100K, which just isn’t feasible for most startups.

So we work creatively within those constraints, integrating what we can, designing front-end experiences that feel seamless, and protecting patient data every step of the way.

4. Why do you think women’s hormonal health has been historically stigmatized or overlooked in Canada, and what needs to change?

For generations, women’s symptoms have been dismissed, minimized, or chalked up to being “too emotional.” To this day, hormonal health is deeply complex and still poorly understood in mainstream care. Not to mention the way the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study was reported in the early 2000s creating widespread fear around hormone therapy, despite the fact that the data was misinterpreted and later clarified. That reporting set us back decades.
Now, within the women’s health space, we have to spend a lot of time educating, informing, cutting through the noise and dismantling deeply rooted, systemic barriers to care.

For public healthcare providers it is imperative that we provide better education, resources and funding to ensure that they can be the first line of support for women in Canada.

At Coven Women’s Health, we’ve built an approach that is rooted in evidence based care, community and collaboration with primary care providers. When we all work together to put women at the centre of care, that’s when real change happens.

5. How does Coven Women’s Health remove barriers to care that women have traditionally faced?

We designed Coven Women’s Health to make hormonal care more accessible from day one.

No referrals. No waitlists.

Virtual appointments.

A collaborative care team — nurses, physicians, registered dietitians, registered therapists — that works together.
And programs that provide support for challenges that are often dismissed or misunderstood. Whether you’re navigating perimenopause, PMDD, PCOS, or just trying to get answers.

Plus, fair and transparent pricing with eligibility for HSA and Extended Benefits reimbursement.

We’ve removed waitlists, cut the red tape, and built care around real life, not the other way around.

6. What role do integrated programs — medical, nutritional, mental wellness — play in improving outcomes for women in hormonal transition?

A huge one. Hormonal shifts affect everything; mood, metabolism, cognition, relationships. So care has to be comprehensive.

At Coven Women’s Health, we integrate medical treatment, nutrition, and mental health support into every core program. That’s what leads to better outcomes: not treating symptoms in isolation, but understanding and supporting the whole person.

7. How do you see technology and virtual care shaping the future of women’s health?

Virtual care has removed barriers — geography, time, stigma — and made support more accessible than ever. But the real opportunity is in building connected experiences: personalized content, real time health data, wraparound support that follows women through their journey.

The sum of the parts will mean that women’s health will be better understood and open up a brave new world of prevention and treatment.

8. Looking ahead, how will Coven Women's Health continue to lead in innovation?

By staying focused on women and what they tell us they need. We’ll keep building programs that are rooted in evidence, responsive, integrated, and easy to access. We’ll continue to push the boundaries of our healthcare infrastructure and outdated EMRs. And we will continue to experiment with AI and automation to support our clinical team and scale our impact.

But most of all, we’ll keep challenging the status quo without falling into the pitfalls of technology enablement. Women and their experiences will always be at the heart of what we do and our exceptional care team is who ensures our patients are heard, validated and supported. Not technology.