With a heightened focus on health equity throughout our work, ONC has adopted the concept of “health equity by design.” Along those lines, health IT can, and should, be used to better identify and mitigate disparities while enhancing opportunities for underrepresented populations. In 2019, under the Leading Edge Acceleration Projects (LEAP) for Health IT program, ONC funded the University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School (Dell Med) to design, develop, and demonstrate enhanced patient engagement technologies for care and research, with a focus on health equity…
The FHIRedApp platform was designed using human-centered design methodology to identify the needs and preferences of a diverse group of Latino, African-American, and Asian-American patients. To design an easy-to-use platform, the team held 20 Community Engagement Studio (CES) sessions with ethnically and racially diverse patients from Central Texas. The process involved beta testing, semi-structured interviews, and pilot testing with participants to ensure the app’s high usability.
A community navigator led each CES session, and the discussion topics included community health experiences, community readiness, design preferences, adoption, and sustainability. The process for designing the app also incorporated human-centered design methodologies and insights gathered from the CES sessions helped identified features and capabilities that ethnically and racially diverse patients desired from a health app platform. A high-fidelity prototype of the app (Figure 1) was then developed, beta tested by diverse patients, and used by the development team to code for the final app… Read the full article here.
