Advancing Health Equity: Bridging the Telehealth Divide
Introduction
Henry Ford Health recently held a two-day digital health summit, "Advancing Health Equity: Bridging the Telehealth Divide," to address the growing issue of digital health equity. The event aimed to foster an environment of radical collaboration, humility, and inclusivity, leveraging assets to address the digital divide.
Goals of the Summit
The summit’s goals were to:
- Foster an environment of radical collaboration, humility, and inclusivity, leveraging assets.
- Leverage the knowledge and lived experience of participants involved in community engagement sessions.
- Collate ideation content that can be turned into solutions and used as a source of future development through a framework model.
Community Engagement Sessions
The largest portion of the summit was focused on community engagement sessions, which were broken up into six groups: Older Adults, General Adults, and Peds and Family. Each group was tasked with identifying an area of focus from the digital equity methodology, which comprises five areas: advocacy and awareness, access and affordability, technical support, digital skills, and devices.
Key Topics and Takeaways
The following topics received significant attention:
- Digital Health and Telehealth Equity: Understanding what digital equity is and how it applies to telehealth is a relatively new conversation in the healthcare space. The summit aimed to create conversations that fostered a sharing of knowledge and resources, as well as increased understanding of the subject.
- Barriers and Assets: Participants identified existing barriers and assets in the digital equity space, highlighting the importance of addressing these issues to improve health outcomes.
- Community Organizations: The summit showcased the work of various community organizations serving the Detroit and Metro Detroit area in the digital equity space, including the City of Detroit’s Office of Digital Equity and Inclusion, Human-I-T, the Detroit Area Agency on Aging, and Empower My Future.
Conclusions and Recommendations
Based on the summit, several conclusions and recommendations emerged:
- Tap into your communities: Community members know best and should be part of the conversations in developing solutions to ensure a more comprehensive approach.
- Don’t design solutions only with the default user in mind: Make sure solutions consider the occasionally overlooked user (can be challenging to use) and the overlooked user (cannot use solutions at all).
- Invest in education and communication: Offer patient options to receive health help and encourage them to seek medical checkups before major health issues arise.
Participant Feedback
Some participant feedback included:
- "Invest in education and communication, as well as offer human interaction to provide patient options to receive health help and encourage them as to why one should seek medical checkups before major health issues."
- "Digital literacy is important and it’s urgent to act on it now, before we are hit by another catastrophe. One person cannot do it all. It takes a village."
FAQs
Q: What was the goal of the summit?
A: The goal was to foster an environment of radical collaboration, humility, and inclusivity, leveraging assets to address the digital divide.
Q: What were the key topics discussed at the summit?
A: The topics included digital health and telehealth equity, barriers and assets, and community organizations serving the Detroit and Metro Detroit area.
Q: What were some of the conclusions and recommendations that emerged from the summit?
A: The conclusions and recommendations included tapping into community knowledge, designing solutions for all users, and investing in education and communication.
Q: What was the feedback from participants?
A: Some participant feedback included the importance of education and communication, the urgency of addressing digital literacy, and the need for collaboration to address the digital divide.
