Data ’ s Role in Health Equity: Digging into the Root of the Problem

As we’ve been becoming more patient centric in healthcare, we have become more and more aware of the challenges different demographics face while trying to receive the care they need. As a result, health equity has been a hot topic and organizations have been searching for solutions. Because in order to put our patients first, we need to be sure that includes all of our patients, not just some of them. But just as important as finding solutions are, we need to be sure that we do it right. A problem as deep as inequality can’t be fixed with temporary solutions just like you can’t fix a leaky pipe with some tape. You need to dig down and find the root of the problem and start the fix there. In healthcare, the place to start is with data. All of the decisions made in healthcare are based on the data we gather, so we need to make sure it’s sound. Are we getting the representation needed to cover all of our patients? Are there biases in how the data is gathered or interpreted? We reached out to our amazing Healthcare IT Today Community to get their insights on the importance of data in achieving health equity. The following is what they had to say on the subject. Deepti Sharma, Senior Vice President of Product Management at HSBlox Improving Health Equity requires proper measurement and interpretation of available SDoH data. It is a complex problem due to the variety of structured/semi-structured/unstructured data sets that resides in multiple source systems...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Ambulatory Analytics/Big Data C-Suite Leadership Communication and Patient Experience Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System LTPAC 4medica Amit Phadnis Andy Flanagan Availity Blue Shield of California BluePath H Source Type: blogs