Informatics to Support Inclusive and Equitable Healthcare

Abstract: Many people face marginalization by today’s healthcare system or society at large, and those experiences often lead to healthcare inequities as well as poor health outcomes. Marginalization can arise from a variety of sources, including social media, clinical encounters, health research, and even health technologies. Recently, more attention has been paid to these issues, such as through weekly highlights of equity, diversity, and inclusion articles in the high-profile medical journal JAMA; however, much more work is needed. Informatics approaches could provide new opportunities both to understand these problems more deeply and to develop new systems and strategies to reduce the problems. In this talk, I will describe several informatics projects that utilize person-centered, participatory, or community-based approaches to understand people’s experiences and to support more inclusive and equitable healthcare.

Bio: Dr. Wanda Pratt is a Professor in the Information School with an adjunct appointment in Biomedical Informatics & Medical Education in the Medical School at the University of Washington. She also served as the Information School’s inaugural Associate Dean for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access, and Sovereignty (IDEAS). She received her Ph.D. in Medical Informatics from Stanford University, her M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas, and her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on both understanding the work people do to manage their health as well as designing new technologies to support that work and reduce its burden. She has worked with hospitalized patients as well as people coping with a variety of chronic diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, asthma, and heart disease. Her recent work focuses on support for people from historically marginalized or underestimated communities. Dr. Pratt has received best paper awards from the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), and the Journal of the American Society of Information Science & Technology (JASIS&T). Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Intel, Google, and Microsoft. Dr. Pratt is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics.