Dr Amila Patel on Designing Digital Health Solutions With the Patient in Mind

To ensure patients will utilize digital health solutions, they need to be at the table when these tools are being designed, said Amila Patel, PharmD, chief clinical officer, Navigating Cancer.

Transcript

Research presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology found that patients whose language preference was English were significantly more engaged in digital health solutions than patients whose preference was Spanish. Was language the only barrier or are there other enhancements that need to be made to close that gap?

Beyond the language preferences, and making that integrated into our solution, there are a number of other barriers within these types of populations. I think one of them is around cultural differences. So, often these patients might have concerns about privacy, or how these tools are being used beyond their own use. And so, it really requires kind of a strong commitment and outreach towards these patients to educate them that these tools are really beneficial for their care, and they can help them along their cancer journey.

The other thing, too, is that in the state of Texas, Spanish language patients are often living in rural settings, where there's less access to resources like high broadband use. It also requires us to break down some of those structural barriers, and that requires some commitments from a regulatory and policy perspective, as well.

How do we ensure use of digital health solutions doesn't widen disparities between those who can access them and those who cannot?

I think that there's probably 3 key areas we'd want to address there. So, the first is that patients and their caregivers need to have a seat at the table as we're designing these tools to make sure that they're accessible and they can be easily adopted for them. I think secondly, clinicians need to have the resources to be able to adopt these tools, as well, and make sure that their patients have access to them. And then I think the last thing is, from a technology vendor standpoint, we need to make sure that the people developing and designing these solutions are representative of the populations that they are serving.