| | APRIL 202319UTLOOKHealthcare Tech As IT leaders we can help drive change through the way we think of our tools, the standards and expectations we set for our data analysts or BI developers, the way we coach our analysts to interact with data requestors, and the way we share expertise for technology projectsdespite the overall rate improvement, our disparity in flu vaccination rates for African-American patients actually got worse.Another study we kicked off around the same time involved examining our telehealth usage and disparities during the pandemic. With Drs. Edward Mougey and James Franciosi as lead investigators, we explored not only patient demographics (REaL and financial class) but also community characteristics down to the census block. We identified that Telehealth was not as accessible to households whose native language is not English, lower education rates, lower income rates, and without access to broadband internet. Our data supports the increasing inequity among those who are and are not able to access and utilize technology, a digital divide in pediatric telehealth.What these two projects had in common is that they were facilitated by analytics capability that was put in place before the requests for the data emerged. The models exist, can be repeated, and can be scaled with some fairly basic resourcing. We built standards, informed by system SMEs, because we knew they would be needed eventually.Like many health systems today, we have workgroups of leaders focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion, disparities in patient outcomes and prevention rates, turnover rates among our under-represented staff, and more. These groups are actively working on community outreach strategies, education, budget planning for interpreters, patient experience transformation, and recruitment strategies. From my seat on the Analytics and IT side, a lot of the planning will ultimately translate into requests and tickets, new projects and additional data work for my team. It is critical work that will engage the team and help drive improvement, but it is not the only work we can do.As IT leaders we can help drive change through the way we think of our tools, the standards and expectations we set for our data analysts or BI developers, the way we coach our analysts to interact with data requestors, and the way we share expertise for technology projects. Unlike health system advocates and leaders that have to walk a fine line politically as they co-author or co-sign policy statements and public letters, we are able to promote insight about health disparities through the much less controversial lens of technical specifications or approaches to analysis. We can help educate our customers about the importance of building an equity lens into every dashboard, every pathway, and every new digital health tool or system by referencing ROI and the benefit of broadening the audience for new products. We can explain how this data and analysis are critical to quality improvement, better performance on payer contracts, and every population health strategy. Our analysts have the amazing power to introduce new concepts to a new audience with a simple "hey, check this out"; "did you see this in the data?"; or "I built this extra data sheet for you". Our improvement work during the pandemic in 2020 is still a source of great pride, with great lessons in teamwork, in leveraging technology and analytics, and in being nimble to pivot our care delivery models in response to unexpected change. What makes me even more proud, however, is knowing that thanks to the lessons we learned through our disparities work, and the analytics models and capabilities we had the foresight to build, we could do it all again even better, for all our patients, tomorrow. HT
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