The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) will hold a webinar on sociotechnical interventions for health disparity reduction on Wednesday, May 16th at 1pm ET. During the webinar, Katie Siek (Indiana) and Tiffany Veinot (Michigan) will discuss the conclusions from the recent Computing Community Consortium (CCC) workshop of the same name.

Tiffany Veinot

Katie Siek

On April 9-10, 2018, the CCC held a visioning workshop on Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction, co-located with the Society for Behavioral Medicine 39th Annual Meeting in New Orleans, in order to examine the opportunities and challenges facing sociotechnical interventions designed to improve the health of disadvantaged populations and reduce health disparities within them. Health disparities are the differences in the occurrence of disease and rate of mortality across one disadvantaged subset of the population in comparison to the general population or other groups. They may emerge due to socially stratifying factors such as race, gender, income, education, disability, sexual orientation, and place of residence.

This workshop brought together leading researchers in computing, health informatics, health disparities, and behavioral medicine from academia, industry, and government to create an integrative research agenda for sociotechnical interventions to reduce health disparities. It focused on four major themes/questions:

• Theory to Design and Implementation: “How do researchers appropriately identify and map theory to design, implementation, and evaluation?”
• Sociotechnical System Blackboxes: “How researchers can understand when sociotechnical systems elicit positive, negative or neutral health outcomes for disparity populations, can we identify why? How do we identify the individual or combined impacts of theory and design?”
• Sociotechnical Systems to Inform Theory: “How do the data that sociotechnical systems collect impact theory? How do we negotiate the dosing of sociotechnical systems from what is clinically needed to what people are willing to use? “
• Multidimensional Evaluation to Reduce Health Disparities at the Population Level: “How do we prevent unintended consequences of sociotechnical interventions?”

During the AMIA webinar, Dr. Siek and Dr. Veinot will discuss the conclusions from this workshop and will take audience questions about the topics. A workshop report is in progress and will appear on the CCC website once it is finished.

Visit the workshop webpage to learn more about the workshop. To learn more about the webinar and register to attend, visit the website.