Building A Pro-Black World

Addressing Inequities in Health Technology

Sonia Sarkar

Recently, the Techquity for Health Coalition, a group of healthcare companies, policy experts, and researchers, launched an effort to highlight and address inequities in the health technology industry.¹ In theory, tech solutions such as disease management apps and wearable devices make users' and care providers' lives easier. In practice, these technologies can worsen inequities—and introduce new ones—particularly for marginalized communities already subject to harmful practices such as data surveillance.²

The announcement follows a report published last spring by Ipsos and the HLTH Foundation, the coalition's backbone organization.³ The report includes insights from interviews with industry stakeholders and outlines opportunities and risks inherent to the growing health technology industry, which received nearly $40 billion in investment in 2021.⁴ In it, the authors note technology's increasing influence on health outcomes, sharing that an individual's access to education, employment, or even food—all key determinants of health—is significantly reliant on their ability to use and access technology.

In the past decade, due to changing health policies and financial incentives, health systems are increasingly acknowledging patients' social needs and implementing technology platforms to address them. For example, when a patient comes into the doctor's office, they are screened for social needs such as food and housing insecurity ...