Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has once again highlighted the ubiquity and persistence of health inequities along with our inability to respond to them in a timely and effective manner. There is an opportunity to address the limitations of our current approaches through new models of informatics-enabled research and clinical practice that shift the norm from small- to large-scale patient engagement. We propose augmenting our approach to address health inequities through informatics-enabled citizen science, challenging the types of questions being asked, prioritized, and acted upon. We envision this democratization of informatics that builds upon the inclusive tradition of community-based participatory research (CBPR) as a logical and transformative step toward improving individual, community, and population health in a way that deeply reflects the needs of historically marginalized populations.
Citation
Rupa S Valdez, Don E Detmer, Philip Bourne, Katherine K Kim, Robin Austin, Anna McCollister, Courtney C Rogers, Karen C Waters-Wicks, Informatics-enabled citizen science to advance health equity, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Volume 28, Issue 9, September 2021, Pages 2009–2012, https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocab088