The maternal health crisis in the United States is becoming increasingly worse, with disparities continuing to escalate among marginalized populations. mHealth can contribute to addressing the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) that produce inequities in maternal morbidity and mortality. Reducing inequities through mHealth can be achieved by designing these technologies to align with SDOH.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: By reducing barriers to accessing health services and by supporting health management, consumer health informatics has the potential to reduce health disparities. Yet, technologies are still being designed without considerations for racial and ethnic minoritized populations. This paper reviews consumer health informatics research within this population to assess for whom and how such technologies are being designed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs the informatics community grows in its ability to address health disparities, there is an opportunity to expand our impact by focusing on the disability community as a health disparity population. Although informaticians have primarily catered design efforts to one disability at a time, digital health technologies can be enhanced by approaching disability from a more holistic framework, simultaneously accounting for multiple forms of disability and the ways disability intersects with other forms of identity. The urgency of moving toward this more holistic approach is grounded in ethical, legal, and design-related rationales.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Diet and nutrition management is an integral component of Crohn disease (CD) management. This type of management is highly variable and individualized and, thus, requires personalized approaches. Consumer health information technology (CHIT) designed to support CD management has typically supported this task as everyday life work and, not necessarily, as illness work.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: The aim of this scoping review is to provide an overview of the existing research that investigates the lived experience during the peri-diagnostic period of breast cancer.
Methods: Nine databases were searched for relevant literature between January 2007 and April 2019. Data were extracted and categorized using deductive and inductive approaches.
The COVID-19 pandemic has once again highlighted the ubiquity and persistence of health inequities along with our inability to respond to them in a timely and effective manner. There is an opportunity to address the limitations of our current approaches through new models of informatics-enabled research and clinical practice that shift the norm from small- to large-scale patient engagement. We propose augmenting our approach to address health inequities through informatics-enabled citizen science, challenging the types of questions being asked, prioritized, and acted upon.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrecision medicine can revolutionize health care by tailoring treatments to individual patient needs. Advancing precision medicine requires evidence development through research that combines needed data, including clinical data, at an unprecedented scale. Widespread adoption of health information technology (IT) has made digital clinical data broadly available.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Am Med Inform Assoc
February 2021
The widespread use of telehealth resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to further exacerbate inequities faced by people with disabilities. Although, for some members of the disability community, the option to engage with telehealth may result in reduced barriers to care, for others, inadequate attention to the design, implementation, and policy dimensions may be detrimental. Addressing such considerations is imperative to mitigate health inequities faced by the disability community.
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