The Digital Health and Racial Justice Lab is a use-inspired research collective aiming to help patients, clinicians, technologists, and policymakers to document and overcome barriers to the use of innovative health technologies. Housed within the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University, the Lab welcomes scholars, health care providers, patients, and caregivers committed to researching and advocating for responsible innovation and racial justice within the world of digital health to join in this work.
This domain is predominantly shaped by powerful and well-resourced stakeholders who work within hospital systems and technology companies that have the same characteristics. This is a problem because, even when these stakeholders try to design and deploy innovative technologies intended to help populations that don’t have this same power or level of resources, and whose health suffers because of structural barriers to the equitable and just delivery of health care, these technologies and the interventions they are a part of don’t always account for and mitigate these harms.
The Lab works to address this problem by building relationships with these powerful and well-resourced stakeholders as well as marginalized patient communities who stand to benefit from innovative digital health technologies. The ultimate goal of this work is to identify and ameliorate these barriers to health and health care, and to generate practical interventions and policy solutions that look beyond the excitement of innovation to create the kinds of changes that would enable equitable benefit from digital health technologies.
The Lab is driven by the belief that health and health care are human rights. It is committed to understanding how innovative digital health technologies harm patients both through data bias and racialization. And it is dedicated to creating digital health futures that address these harms.