Now Is Our Chance to Design Digital Health for Equity: Here’s How We Can Do It

As we embrace breakthroughs in digital health, let’s not cut, paste and proliferate the health equity issues of the offline world. We can only claim success when we measure who’s engaging, who’s not and why. It’s a new day in healthcare. Access to mobile apps on smartphones can change outcomes in diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety and numerous other conditions that require behavior change.

Billions of dollars in capital are pouring into the digital health sector in anticipation of hockey-stick growth curves. While we’re on our way to tackling diseases in groundbreaking ways, we can’t create a world in which digital health is a privilege for the tech-savvy, wealthy and educated.

With chronic conditions already disproportionately prevalent in Black, Hispanic, low-income and elderly populations, we can’t afford to create new types of inequity. Today, 97% of Americans own a cellphone and 85% own a smartphone. While this data implies everyone has access to mobile phones, we have work to do.

According to a recent National Poll on Healthy Aging from the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, just 44% of older Americans ages 50 to 80 have ever used a health app. Those in poor health are least likely to have done so. However, those with higher incomes and education are much more likely to have used health apps.

We can only claim success when we measure who’s engaging, who’s not and why. Let’s create and reward a digital health ecosystem that is responsible for tackling socioeconomic barriers, by design.