Creating Inclusive Digital Health Innovations and Re-Defining Acute Care with Dr. Monique Smith
Shifting our Gaze, Re-Imagining Healthcare
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.
Connect with Dr. Monique Smith:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/moniquesmithmd/
https://twitter.com/drmoniqueasmith
https://twitter.com/HealthDesign_ED
Language about Podcast obtained from InOn Health Podcast Description.
