Disparities in Health Care and the Digital Divide

By S. Saeed, Ross MacRae Masters. Current Psychiatry Reports, 2021

457 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Purpose of Review Disparities in health outcomes are a well documented and worrisome part of our health care system. These disparities persist in spite of, and are occasionally exacerbated by, new technologies that are intended to improve health care. This results in a “digital divide” in which populations that have poorer health outcomes continue to have poorer health outcomes despite technological improvements. Recent Findings In many ways, the digitical divide is already shrinking via improved access to internet and technology/process improvements. For example, people with schizophrenia, PTSD, and bipolar disorder have had their care successfully augmented by new technology. However, problems persist- being impoverished, female, and black all correlate with decreased probability of completing a telehealth visit, and millions of americans have insufficient internet access to complete telehealth visits. Summary We must continue to utilize new technology in health care to improve outcomes, but we must also be wary to ensure those outcomes are equitable across different populations.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08f025a1d5c95849c056e02591c97681ac6ba87a

Citations in the corpus

• A Survey of Large Language Models for Healthcare: from Data, Technology, and Applications to Accountability and Ethics (2023, unknown): “One major barrier is the disparity in levels of digital development, often referred to as the ‘‘digital divide’’ [216].”