This episode of the InOn Health podcast features Dr. Monique Smith, ER physician and Founding Executive Director of Health DesignED. She reveals insights from a personal and professional perspective regarding the development behind digital health innovations, ensuring inclusion for diverse patient populations.
Show Notes
In this episode of the InOn Health podcast, KP introduces Dr. Monique Smith, ER physician and founding executive director of Health DesignED. Dr. Smith opens the conversation by sharing her upbringing as a first-generation Jamaican American and how it influenced her to study anthropology as a pre-med student at Harvard University. She explains how she incorporated her anthropology lens into her practice as a practitioner of public health and health systems redesign—providing patient care requires understanding people and their stories.
Dr. Smith discusses the concept of equitable, tech-enabled care—stemming from the idea of ensuring people have comfort and trust utilizing virtual care services. She elaborates how people of color, specifically women of color, lack trust with in-person care, often feeling unheard and unseen. This concept serves as the foundation for Health DesignED, an organization dedicated to providing equitable, tech-enabled acute care to diverse patient populations. Dr. Smith describes how this initiative aims to transform the way patients assess and define their medical emergencies, whereas previously determined by healthcare professionals. The overall goal is to incorporate equity into well-being.
Dr. Smith explains how developing and designing platforms require an intentional element, like understanding user pain points. Building inclusive products and services require creative and diverse thinking and solutions, which are more likely to be achieved in diverse teams. Dr. Smith provides insights into how a lack of diversity in digital health creates implicit bias, excluding other populations and embedding systems unable to treat people of color in the best way. Dr. Smith addresses one of the prominent barriers in the healthcare system—preconceived notions about how medicine is practiced, not accounting for the diverse ways people experience healthcare and their distinct outcomes.
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What is InOn Health Podcast?
Health equity issues in our country have been around for decades – largely impacting communities of color and rural areas. When it comes to economic and racial disparities in health the evidence is clear. This is more than a hot topic. Covid-19 has exposed the underbelly of how social determinants of health and racial disparities play out in our country. What we need now is to impart lasting change.
Welcome to the InOn Health podcast. I’m your host Kaakpema Yelpaala, and I’m the co-founder and CEO of InOn Health.
In this podcast we’re going to be talking about health equity. We’ll be talking to entrepreneurs, thought leaders, investors, and other industry experts in healthcare and public health. The topics we’ll cover will range from racial disparities in health to digital innovation for diverse populations, and ultimately how we build better policy to more inclusively serve everyone around their healthcare needs.
Join me on this podcast series to not only be inspired by our leaders but also to get insight on how we can all take action.