Katie Siek
A new episode of Catalyzing Computing, the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) official podcast, is now available. This episode is part two of Khari Douglas‘ (CCC Senior Program Associate) interview with Dr. Katie Siek, a professor in Informatics and the Chair of Informatics at Indiana University – Bloomington. Dr. Siek is interested in integrating pervasive technologies in health and wellness environments to study how technology affects interventions. Her research interests include human computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and health informatics. In this episode, Katie discusses health disparities and how computing technologies can play a role in their reduction, as well as the challenges to doing health informatics research in the field. Listen to the episode here.
Below is a transcription from part of the conversation about the CCC’s 2018 workshop on Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction. It is lightly edited for readability and the full transcript can be found here.
[Catalyzing Computing Episode 34 – starting at 1:07]
Khari: So a couple of years ago, you were one of the organizers of a workshop the CCC did on sociotechnical interventions for health disparity reduction. Can you give an overview of what that workshop was about? What are health disparities and why do they need to be addressed?
Katie: Yes, sure. So health disparities are when we see differences in a group’s health outcome. It’s anything from disease diagnosis to survival rates, when we compare that with the general population. Groups that experience health disparities range from socioeconomic status, race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and where you live — for example, rural versus suburban or urban. Besides just being the right thing to do, by addressing health disparities we want to improve equity and the overall health of the population. But, if appealing to humanity isn’t enough, then you can think of it financially — everyone pays the cost when we have groups who are suffering health-wise. That’s why we have to address health disparities.
Researchers have been saying for years that technology can improve health disparities, my work included. Like, we can’t afford a dietitian for everyone who needs it. Great, let’s give them an app to do it on. There’s no specialists in your community. Fine, let them visit the online clinic. But research studies have been kind of small. Most of the time they’re prototypes systems, so we have to make sure the small before we go broadly.
Also, this work has been done in silos. There’s researchers in computing working on health disparities, like myself. There’s people in health and medical informatics, there’s people in behavioral medicine. There’s also researchers who actually do research just in health disparities. In this workshop we wanted to bring these four groups of researchers together, share what we know, learn about what we don’t know, and identify gaps.
Khari: So what are the biggest challenges or limitations, currently, to using technology to address health disparities?
Katie: There are so many. Just a few are access to technology and the Internet. We see that here, largely for the Internet. It’s just amazing. My co-organizer Tiffany Veinot and some colleagues just wrote a paper about how the Internet is kind of like one of those requirements for life now. We just need it to survive. And the truth is, in rural settings, in the research I do in southern Indiana, we’ll talk to Comcast or the local Internet provider and they’re like, “If you’re not within 500 meters of this road, you don’t get Internet.” So what can we do? We have to spend a whole lot of money on satellite and wireless if it’s available in the area.
There’s also issues with technology in terms of usability and understandability. If people don’t have technology, if they don’t have access to the Internet, their understanding of how to interact with these apps is not universal. Then we have cultural norms, especially within groups who experience health disparities. There’s various cultural norms that are going on that we must address to make it personalized and relevant to them. Finally, it’s the understanding of the context, kind of like that story about doing a workshop and teaching about cooking [listen to part one here for this]. Understanding the context there…I was kind of like, “Oh, yeah, I cook for my family. I bulk cook for one day a week, and then we eat the leftovers during the week. I’ll show them how to do it.” And then working in their kitchen, working with the resources they had, all of a sudden it was like, this is different and we have to adapt.
That’s just one context, but understanding how this all impacts their technology use and their health. One of the standard examples, but it still stands in my mind, was just that one of the health disparity researchers was talking about an intervention where an app would remind you to go for a walk. But then the person would say, “I don’t feel comfortable walking in my neighborhood.” If you or I are designing this app we would be like, “Sure. Go for a walk. Sounds like a good idea.” Whereas to understand, what’s the walkability of the area? What’s the safety of the area? What is the weather like? You mentioned you’re in Seattle — what’s is the weather like? Do you want to go for a walk right now? So all of this is important when we’re addressing technology for everybody, especially those who experience health disparities.
Listen to the full interview with Dr. Siek below or find it on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Blubrry | Google Podcasts | iHeartRadio | Soundcloud | Youtube. If you prefer to read rather than listen, the transcript of the interview is available here.
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