Presentation Abstract

Title: Addressing Disparities Using Health Information Technology

Health information technologies, such as electronic health records, patient portals, and consumer technologies, offer many opportunities to address disparities. Provider-facing technologies can be used to standardize or tailor care, monitor outcomes, or incorporate social determinants of health into healthcare processes. Patient-facing technologies could improve patient access to personal data and help them communicate with their physicians and fellow patients. Unfortunately, we also face a serious risk that health information technologies could exacerbate inequalities, by benefiting primarily the organizations and patients who already have the most resources. In this talk, we will examine trends in use and impact of electronic patient portals, which have reflected broader “digital divide” problems, together with overview of efforts to narrow disparities in use of this technology. In particular, we will focus on a successful initiative by a community health center which narrowed disparities by focusing primarily on organizational processes rather than on patient behavior. This, we will argue, is an example of an upstream intervention that has the potential to scale and reach large numbers of patients.

About Dr. Ancker

Jessica Ancker’s research centers on using health information technology (IT) to improve decisions and health care quality, especially through optimal design and behavioral science. She applies this work to help make the health care system more patient-centered, to reduce health care disparities, and to improve the fit between information technology and the work done by both providers and patients.

One of her primary areas of interest is numeracy. She currently holds an NIH R01 research grant to synthesize the evidence about how health care professionals should present complex quantitative information to patients in the most cognitively manageable format. She draws from research traditions in health literacy, human factors, and psychological decision science (behavioral economics) to examine how information design can improve comprehension and facilitate better decisions. Her publications on patient health numeracy have led to two invited talks at the Institute of Medicine.

Dr. Ancker is crosstrained in health services research and has conducted large-scale retrospective cohort studies leveraging EHR data to study health care quality and the impact of social determinants of health. By combining health services research methods with her behavioral science perspective, she has also done novel work analyzing EHR data to draw inferences about physician decisions, use of clinical decision support, and alert fatigue. She routinely collaborates with clinical experts to apply these methods and insights to different clinical problems (such as opioid prescribing, diabetes, all-cause hospital readmission, and severe mental illness) and to explore policy implications of health information technology interventions and research.

Dr. Ancker did not disclose any conflicts of interest for this workshop.