10 Solutions To Ensure Healthcare Equity Among All In Extending Healthtech Innovation
Facilitating inclusiveness must be an objective for the healthtech developers and proponents as concerns over healthcare equity grow. The healthcare industry has been confronting multiple social implications since its inception, and now with healthtech in the scenario, there arises another debate over discrimination. Taking a closer look at the operations of the healthcare industry reveals several loopholes that get a boost by the healthtech innovations in place. While people are leveraging healthtech benefits, it is often a far-off dream for a measurable part of the population who still strive to access healthtech benefits. By recognizing this situation, experts have come up with a number of solutions to defeat this inequity.
Fair Representation
While developing healthtech innovation for the masses, the best way to adopt healthcare equity is by accommodating the historically marginalized people in the process along with the existing team. Identifying the people who are least benefited from the healthtech innovations such as community health workers and placing them in the team of decision-makers can lead to a tremendous change and improvement.
Review Communication Gap
The conventional relationship barriers that exist are almost outdated by now and have caused immense troubles as the patients who are in immediate need fall back. The connection between patients, health workers, organizations, decision-makers, and investors is essential to ensuring healthcare equity. It further reduces the stacked-up responsibilities of the administration, and logistics allow healthcare providers to focus more on the patients.
Considering All Aspects
Usually, population health or public health scenario is visualized based on three traditional aspects, patient history, lab results, and genomic consequence. However, there are more fields and aspects to consider while determining population-wide health standards. Few parameters include stable housing, financial stability, access to safe water, sanitation, food, and insurance. Acquiring data from linguists, economists, social rights activists must also be valued besides healthcare data scientists.
Remote Medical Studies
As education shifts majorly to the digital platforms, facilitating healthcare studies to the ones who are unable to access them physically is an efficient way of empowering the secluded regions of the world. This easy learning without having to relocate will enable the learners to take steps in developing healthcare infrastructure in their locations.
Merge Big Data and Small Data
With the evolving data science industry, data that are majorly available on the crucial centers are given importance and analyzed while overlooking the wide variety of data available on disconnected devices and eccentric points of care. The scattered data, thus, serves a potential purpose in ensuring healthcare equity through healthcare innovation based on that. Community healthcare facilities, pharmacies, local care centers established for primary care are some of the examples that could be highly beneficial to extract small data from.
Penetrating Connectivity
While the time and speed have been expedited across the healthcare industry with digital communication and other telehealth applications emerging, it is also essential to consider the disadvantaged locations that are often overlooked, for remote healthcare benefits. Enhancing the social sphere is an utmost failure when half of the population.
Increase Fund
Making healthcare facilities accessible and available to all is largely dependent upon the financial resources the healthcare industry possesses to facilitate healthcare equity. While half of the population are eligible to pay their bills, the other half barely acquire their daily requirements.
Embracing Diversity
Embedding traditional science, technology, cultures into the healthtech innovation can significantly accommodate diversity. The demography constantly evolves and changes, but some of their traits still trace back to some centuries. Comparing and replacing it with an equally appealing innovation yet advanced can ensure healthcare equity as challenges of adaptability are overcome.
Right Agenda
Policymakers should adopt the trajectory of healthtech innovation to set long-term goals considering the inequality in society. Secondary objectives are the rate, GDP, scale, and investment in R and D. The local actors in maintaining healthcare equity should focus on the safety of the operating space while ensuring access to all.
Redefining Accountability
The greater forces often hide behind the scenes while controlling the lesser minds to be at the front. The development actors who propound the ideas of technological innovation must be held accountable rather than the ones implemented. It is their responsibility in the first place to include the disadvantages and least benefited people in the framework.