Anyone who has tried to explain perimenopause in a ten-minute appointment knows the routine. You list the symptoms. You get a sympathetic nod. You leave with the distinct sense that two years of broken sleep, brain fog and inexplicable rage at the sound of someone chewing has been compressed into a single line in your notes. Then your GP moves practice, or you get referred on, and you start again from the top.
Oura reckons the problem is measurement – and it has just signed up ten health partners to help fix it.
The smart ring brand has announced that its proprietary Menopause Impact Scale (MIS) is moving beyond the Oura App and into real clinical workflows, via integrations with Alloy Health, Oova, Xella, Pomelo, Wisp, Maven, Mira, Hertility, Gennev and Tia. The idea is simple: instead of describing your symptoms from scratch to every new provider, you arrive with a score that travels with you.
“Women navigating menopause can find themselves explaining the same symptoms to different providers, while the true impact on their daily lives gets reduced to a snapshot in time,” said Dorothy Kilroy, chief commercial officer at Oura. “That’s why we developed the MIS: to give women and their providers a consistent way to track menopause’s impact over time. We built it the way we build everything at Oura – starting with science. Our science and clinical teams reviewed the literature and evaluated the scale across nearly 3,000 women – capturing how menopause affects daily functioning and wellbeing.”
What The Menopause Impact Scale Actually Measures
The MIS is not a symptom checklist. Built by Oura’s science and clinical teams, it measures the impact of menopause on quality of life and daily functioning across 22 symptoms and seven domains – sleep, stress, cognition, self-perception, sexual health and daily functioning among them.
That distinction matters. Menopause has historically been measured narrowly, through isolated symptoms and point-in-time clinical conversations, which is how you end up with “a few hot flushes” on a form and a woman who has not slept properly since 2024. Scoring the impact rather than simply the presence of a symptom is what makes the whole thing actionable.
Pair it with the continuous data an Oura ring is already collecting on sleep, stress, recovery and metabolic health, and you get something closer to a full picture: what you report, plotted against what your body has been doing for months.
600,000 Women Have Already Taken It
Since launching in May, more than 600,000 members have completed the MIS, totalling more than 880,000 completions. Sixty-two percent of respondents are based in the United States, with the remaining 38% distributed around the world.
The gap between those two figures – 600,000 people, 880,000 completions – is interesting. Repeat completions are what create longitudinal data, and longitudinal data is what you need to understand menopause as a multi-year transition rather than a bad month. Oura describes the figures as reflecting “broad global use and the repeated touchpoints needed to support longitudinal measurement”.
In other words: a one-off questionnaire tells your doctor how you feel today. Eighteen months of scores tells her what is actually happening.
The Ten Partners Bringing It Into Clinics
The new ecosystem spans ten partners across three areas of care:
- Menopause-focused clinical care: Alloy Health, Gennev, Wisp and Pomelo, bringing structured quality-of-life measurement into specialist, virtual and digitally delivered menopause care.
- Primary and integrated women’s health care: Maven, Tia and Xella, folding the MIS into broader care models covering perimenopause, well-woman care and cardiovascular health.
- Hormone and biomarker tracking: Oova, Mira and Hertility, pairing MIS impact scores with hormone, biometric and other health data.
Each partner catches you at a different point in the journey, which is rather the point. “By integrating the MIS into how our partners work with patients, we’re giving women a measurement that travels with them and gives every provider they see the same starting point,” Kilroy added. “That’s the difference between managing symptoms in isolation and recognising menopause for what it is: a multi-year health transition that deserves consistent, connected care.”
What The Doctors Make Of It
Chief medical officers across Oura’s partner network are, unsurprisingly, on board,
“Disrupted sleep, brain fog, shifts in mood, lower energy,” said Dr Elizabeth Cherot, chief medical officer at Unified Women’s Health, the parent company of Gennev and the largest OBGYN clinical network in the US. “Women experience the signs and symptoms of this transition in their day-to-day life long before any of it comes up in an exam room. What’s great about the MIS is that it brings her lived experience into the clinical conversation. By integrating evidence-based clinical care with data from her daily life, we’re giving our clinicians at Gennev a better way to track and support her needs as they evolve.”
Dr Sharon Malone, chief medical advisor at Alloy Health, made the case for treating the experience rather than the checklist. “As a physician, one of the most important things I’ve learned is that no two menopause experiences are alike,” she said. “It’s not enough to know what symptoms a woman is having. We need to understand how these symptoms are affecting the quality of a woman’s life. At Alloy, that individual experience is at the heart of how we think about menopause care. There is no one size fits all. The Menopause Impact Scale provides another meaningful layer of context that a woman and her doctor can bring to the conversation. The more we know, the better we are able to help women make informed decisions not just about symptom relief, but also about their long-term health.”
Collectively, Oura says the partnerships create “a common measurement layer” that can support longitudinal care, outcomes research and clinical decision support across providers – connecting what women report with the care they actually receive.
The Science Behind The Score
Oura is keen to stress the MIS was not designed in a marketing meeting. The team evaluated the digital-first instrument with more than 2,900 participants aged 21 to 85, using modern psychometric methods and comparisons with established measures, and has submitted the full validation manuscript for peer review. Worth noting: peer review is pending, not complete.
It also arrives on the back of a decent body of women’s health work. Oura’s first-ever Perimenopause Report analysed aggregate, de-identified data from more than 100,000 female members across early perimenopause, late perimenopause and early postmenopause. A peer-reviewed validation study of more than 1,000 ovulatory cycles found Oura’s physiology-based approach detected 96.4% of ovulations with an average error of 1.26 days, outperforming calendar tracking – including among members with irregular cycles. Separate academic studies have used Oura data to identify temperature increases after conception and to predict whether a pregnancy would deliver before or after its due date with 71% accuracy.
When You Can Actually Use It
From today, members can integrate their MIS results with Alloy Health, Oova, Xella, Pomelo and Wisp. Maven, Mira, Hertility, Gennev and Tia integrations are coming later this year.
The obvious caveat: this is currently a heavily US-weighted rollout, and most of the named partners are American telehealth and clinical networks. If you are navigating perimenopause on the NHS, the MIS is still useful as a personal record – a printable, repeatable score you can take into an appointment – but the seamless provider handover is not here yet.
Why we care: Menopause affects roughly half the population for years at a time, and it is still routinely assessed by asking a woman to summarise her worst months from memory in under ten minutes. A validated, repeatable score that follows you between providers will not fix the treatment gap on its own. But it does change what walks into the room with you – and after decades of being told this is just something to get on with, having the receipts is a start.
The Menopause Impact Scale is available to Oura members in the Oura App. Read Oura’s full announcement here.
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