The S.O.L.V.E. Health Tech team includes thought leaders with expertise in digital health equity, implementation science, and health communications. Contact us if you are interested in booking us for a talk or developing educational materials.
This first module of a three-part series, developed in partnership with the American Medical Association, focuses on how an equity-first approach can be applied to digital health solution development, through meaningful engagement with and formal accountability to marginalized user communities across all phases of the design process.
In this second module of a three-part series, we discuss strategies for implementing and operationalizing digital health solutions that benefit and do no harm to all patients. Because of the critical role that safety-net settings play in delivering care to marginalized patients, this module centers the considerations for safety-net settings, in line with the value of ‘centering the margins.’ However, lessons about delivering equitable care through innovation are broadly applicable across care settings.
In this final module of a three-part series, we focus on how to position technology so that it can improve health for all. Digital health interventions exclude and harm communities that have been marginalized by the US health system by way of historical and current injustices. This necessitates an equity-first approach by evaluators assessing digital health innovations.
In collaboration with the California Health Care Foundation, we created a series of briefs focused on how to create equity and inclusion during technology implementation and design to help health care providers, health plans, and developers reach everyone. The first brief covers how providers and plans can help communities better adopt health tools, and the second brief covers how designers can create more inclusive digital health tools.
Developed in partnership with the Center for Care Innovations and with support from The Commonwealth Fund, the Telemedicine for Health Equity Toolkit helps remote care reach patients with low-incomes and from racial and ethnic minority groups to promote health equity rather than exacerbate health disparities.
In September 2022, Dr. Sarkar mapped elements of health equity to the socioecological framework and identified high priorities for intervention to achieve digital health equity at Stanford Medicine Grand Rounds.
In August 2021, Dr. Lyles outlined best practices for implementing new health care technologies—including telehealth—in practice in an equitable, inclusive way focusing on both the impact to marginalized and minoritized patients and the clinicians and systems that care for them.
In July 2020, we presented key patient barriers to adopting telehealth and offered strategies, resources, and tools to reduce limitations to access.
In a guest essay for the New York Times Opinion, Dr. Adrian Aguilera highlights the promises - and potential inequities - in digital mental health. Questioning whether or not the proliferation of digital mental health is good news for our country, he says it depends. "America's mental health industry faces a stark choice: take advantage of this moment to get help to the millions who need it - including, especially, poor Americans and immigrants - or allow the inequalites that already exist to deepen."
Dr. Aguilera also indicates signs of progress, including app-based programs like DIAMANTE.
His piece adds a critical equity focus to the New York Times' series on America's mental health crisis.