Ecosystems for Equitable Digital Healthcare Innovation
ViVE Conference Session Summary
This article is part of an extended series summarizing discussions at recent healthcare conferences about improving health equity through technology. This session summary contains details on the ViVE 2022 Conference. You can read our conference overview and find links to all articles here.
Learn more about StartingUpGood’s Health + Equity + Tech Project.
Ecosystems for Equitable Digital Healthcare Innovation
Description
Before the ViVE conference began, Together.Health hosted a community event on Sunday covering “Ecosystems for Equitable Digital Healthcare Innovation” that focused on one of the main conference themes, designing tech for health equity.
Together.Health is a digital healthcare innovation collaborative representing over 40 regional, national, and global digital health accelerators, incubators, economic development organizations, government organizations, associations and other ecosystem leaders. By leveraging the regional strength of these organizations at a national and international level, the Collaborative is well-positioned to make a massive impact on the health industry with the launch of their National Digital Health Ecosystem Map. This comprehensive, real-time database of health innovators, investors, and partners will help us better understand the overall US health innovation landscape and where we can best support and ensure its long-term success. This database will eventually provide real time insight into digital health adoption, implementation and by category and therapeutic area.
Join this partner event to learn more about what various regional ecosystem champions are doing to support “health equity by design” through the digital health innovation community. Additionally, you’ll get a chance to learn more about the Together.Health collaborative, its members, and how to get involve in its ambitious goals of sharing best practices and eradicating marketplace friction towards the adoption of digital health innovations.
Speakers
- Kirk Barnes, Co-Founder, TransPharMed
- Rachel Dixon, President & CEO, Prime Health
- Dr. Micky Tripathi, National Coordinator for Health Information
- Stephen Konya, Senior Advisor to the Deputy National Coordinator for Health IT and Innovation Portfolio Lead, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
- Amanda Azadian, Product Manager, Digital Health Strategy, AMA
- Lydie Marc, senior director of fellows and content strategy, Nashville Health Care Council
- Chris Gibbons, Founder & CEO, The Greystone Group, Inc
- Ivelyse Andino, CEO & Founder, Radical Health
- Taylor McPartland, CEO, ScaleHealth
Key Points
Together.Health Overview:
- Kirk Barnes and Rachel Dixon are the new co-Chairs of Together.Health.
- Together.Health is a national ecosystem of ecosystems. There are currently 50 geographies represented.
- It is a single force multiplier for all things digital health.
- It wants to support and spread the word of good ideas.
- It is leveraging digital health to make sure there is equity in healthcare across US populations, like rural health and mental health.
Office of National Coordinator (ONC) Overview:
- Micky Tripathi introduced the goals and work of the ONC within Health and Human Services (HHS).
- ONC has around 180 people working on creating standards for health information technology, certifying electronic health record (EHR) systems, and implementing the information sharing requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act.
- Health Equity IT by design — every government agency focuses on health equity. We aren’t going to solve the entire problem, but we can solve for our part of the problem.
- ONC focuses on standardizing data that identifies and captures inequalities in all communities. It also helps mitigate health inequities by supporting interoperability with social service organizations and by identifying algorithmic biases in EHR systems.
- An example of an AI algorithmic bias is a system that assigned care managers to patients with high costs. People with good insurance get more procedures and more diagnostics, so they have higher healthcare costs. Care managers were being assigned to people with better insurance rather than people who needed more help.
- What are you doing to address potential unintended consequences of algorithms and how are you protecting the privacy of your health data?
Member Panel: Healthcare Innovation Community
- Health equity work is everyone’s work.
- Prime Health is a nonprofit that works with historically marginalized populations and ensures that healthcare is working for everyone. It also supports startups in addressing inequities.
- Radical Health works to make healthcare a little less complicated and lonely by bringing people together as a community and working with systems to analyze data insights quickly.
- You are limiting your total addressable market if you are not thinking about how to address systemic barriers for people on Medicaid or low income people with new technologies and options.
- Health equity is a journey, but we have to think differently about solutions because what we have done in the past hasn’t worked. It’s solvable, but not without technology.
- It’s a great time to have uncomfortable conversations.
ScaleHealth Overview
- ScaleHealth is developing a health innovation marketplace that identifies innovative market solutions and helps them accelerate.
- It uses a comprehensive, crowdsourced technology platform to do this.
- There was a call to action issued to sign up for the platform.
- The organizers also issued a call to action to think about health equity by design, not just avoiding negative but advancing positive impacts.
You can read a summary of all our 2022 healthcare conference coverage here, or check out specific coverage of each conference:
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