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Diversifying Digital Health

Earlier this week Health 2.0 held a TECHquality meetup focused on diversity in the digital health industry.  We hoped that this event would foster an honest and frank discussion about how we can create diverse workplaces and develop inclusive technology for the people we serve.  After speakers, Jean-Luc Neptune, Co-Founder at Athletik Health and Nyala Khan, VP of People at Baby+Co, shared their thoughts, meetup attendees were encouraged to share their own experiences and comments in relation to the topic at hand.  Following an engaging and insightful discussion, where people of different backgrounds and walks of life shared their individual viewpoints, the hard questions remained,  what more can we do to ensure that our workplaces are not only diverse, but inclusive? How do we ensure that the companies we build with people, embed the diverse perspectives of those people from the very start?

Year after year diversity reports show little improvement.  This interactive infographic from Information is Beautiful shows a breakdown of employees by gender and ethnicity at some of the top tech companies.  One of the many things that this infographic shows is that the percentage of Black and Latino employees hasn’t changed for many of the companies between 2014-2016. So when will it?  How can we move the needle forward and convert conversation to real action?  Down below are a couple of takeaways from our event,  ones that allow us to not only educate ourselves in the right ways, but takeaways that we can use both as employers and employees of our respective organizations:

Employers

  • Get your people teams onboard 
  • Establish inclusive values, “not just who, but how”
  • Perform structured interviews
  • Institute unconscious bias training 
  • Examine your job descriptions and interview practices for hidden biases
    • Use inclusive language in interviews and job descriptions 
  • Diversify your interviewers
  • Encourage development of employee resource groups
  • Facilitate mentorship within your organization

Employees/candidates

If you have any additional platforms that we can add to this list, please feel free to comment below, we’d love to hear from you!  Also, is your organization interested in keeping the conversation going? Partnership and sponsorship opportunities are available.  Please email sabah@health2con.com for more information.

 

Sabah Pervez is a Senior Program Manager at Catalyst @ Health 2.0.

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2 replies »

  1. Well-written. Diversifying digital health will help provide quality care to patients at lower cost. Solutions like patient referral management, chronic care management, and care management help providers give quality care to their patients, achieve better patient outcomes and at the same time increase their operational efficiency.

  2. Are we ready for the next Paradigm shift? At some point, primary healthcare will be 100% capitated with stop-loss and carve-out protection, and 50% up & down-side risk pools will appear for Complex Healthcare ( separate pools for hospitals and all-other providers, stop-loss protected). The payers will be required to maintain 85% medical loss levels ( the payer margins would depend on the risk pools net surplus). So, what will this require as a basis to solve the cost and quality problems for our nation’s HEALTH? The FINANCIAL processes should be managed as a Common-Pool Resource, as in the portion of our GDP allocated to ‘health spending.’
    .
    The Design Principles for Managing a Common Pool Resource, a “COMMONS,” are already known and fully validated. The SOCIAL processes will require 1) equitably available and ecologically accessible Primary Healthcare by each citizen that is promoted by the stakeholders of each community and 2) a locally funded, responsibility delegated to these stakeholders by a new nationally sanctioned, semi-autonomous institution to mobilize the Social Capital in each community for improving the social mobility opportunities offered to their citizens.
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    Another 7 year indemnity cycle will soon begin. Improved quality, paying attention to how we all share the risk will offer a clear incentive to do it as well as possible. The indemnity folks with capitated HMO experience will tell you that the highest quality healthcare is also the least expensive in the long-run. The Design Principles for a COMMONS will make sure quality healthcare actually occurs. This will be the only means to shed the mantra of Parkinson’s Law, in its many forms. And, the improved quality and cost processes will promote the community based Social Capital required to reduce our nation’s worsening, for 25 years, maternal mortality incidence.
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    If we don’t solve the cost and quality problems of our nation’s healthcare, the sophistication of our data processing systems will no longer be sustainable.