Collaborative Takes on Challenge of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Digital Health Measurement

The recently formed Digital Health Measurement Collaborative Community (DATAcc) announced its first two projects, which will bring together stakeholders from across the healthcare industry to pre-competitively collaborate on the challenge of diversity, equity, and inclusion in digital health measurement.

DATAcc is hosted by the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) a nonprofit organization that supports the development of digital medicine through interdisciplinary collaboration, research, teaching, and the promotion of best practices. The collaborative, which launched in May 2021, comprises leaders from across the government, nonprofit, and private sectors, including healthcare systems, medical technology companies, patient advocates, biopharma, and policy organizations. This group of experts has agreed to focus their first few months on digital inclusion, identifying two distinct project goals:

• To ensure that a broad spectrum of diverse voices (e.g. different races and ethnicities, people with disabilities, all ages, genders, geographies, socioeconomic status, education levels, health status, and sexual orientations) are included in each stage of the product development lifecycle so that diverse populations can utilize and benefit from digital health measurement.

• To standardize the evaluation of inclusivity in the development, deployment and commercialization of digital health measures across contexts of use.

“Equity in health, healthcare, and health outcomes has been a pressing and persistent challenge for decades. Right now, the field has the unique opportunity to build the digital health measurement toolbox with intention, and build it right,” said Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of DiMe, in a statement. “In order to do this, we must create a set of standardized criteria for the inclusion of diverse populations throughout the development, deployment, and commercialization phases of a digital health measurement product. This standardized approach will also allow stakeholders to evaluate whether representative data can be collected and help them to identify where there may be disparities in data collection and health outcomes downstream.”

Digital health measurement also creates the opportunity for more equitable and accessible clinical research and trials. “With digital health measures, we as a company and as a society can access [permission-based] research data on individuals that are not typically seen in traditional healthcare settings,” comments Nirosha M. Lederer, Ph.D., director of real-world evidence strategy at Aetion. “This data can provide valuable insights into the health status of individuals across our society.”

DiMe has brought together the many stakeholders necessary to establish and implement a shared vision of high-quality digital health measurement that is available to and effective for every person. The collaborative will use interdisciplinary expertise, data and use cases to approach their first two projects, ultimately producing outcomes that are actionable and can be used by the community to advance the field.

Participating members of DATAcc include:

• ActiGraph

• Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed)

• Aetion

• AliveCor

• American Telemedicine Association

• Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD)

• Connected Health Initiative

• Consumer Technology Association

• Duke University - Big Ideas Lab

• eHealth Initiative

• HumanFirst