When we talk about improving healthcare, there are many, many different avenues and aspects to work on. Despite the method, the goal is always to make sure people have safe and reliable access to healthcare that they can understand. And more often than not, technology plays a huge role. To get a better understanding of this topic, we reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today Community to ask — what role does technology play in addressing health equity, accessibility, and digital literacy among diverse patient populations? The following are their answers.
Payam Zamani, MD, Founder and CEO at MY DR NOW
Technology should not add complexity to healthcare, it should remove it.
The biggest issue in primary care today is access, and that disproportionately affects underserved populations. If patients cannot get care when they need it, nothing else matters. Technology plays a critical role, but only when it is used to expand access, simplify the experience, and meet patients where they are.
That means designing care around how people actually live. Not everyone can navigate complex digital tools, take time off work, or travel long distances. An effective model uses technology to support multiple access points, whether that is in the clinic, virtually, or in the home, so patients can receive care in a way that works for them.
Equity is not achieved through more tools alone. It is achieved through better access, with technology serving to enable it. When technology is applied correctly, it removes barriers, builds trust, and ensures that high-quality primary care is available to everyone—not just those who can navigate the system.
Morris Panner, President at Intelerad, A GE HealthCare Company
Technology can either widen healthcare gaps or help close them. The difference comes down to how intentionally it’s designed and implemented. The biggest barrier for many patients isn’t access to care itself but access to the information needed to participate in their care. Imaging results, diagnostic reports, and follow-up instructions are often scattered across systems that aren’t designed with patients in mind, but health technology can simplify that experience and improve equity.
Platforms that unify imaging data and care records make it easier for providers to share results across facilities and teams, which reduces delays and ensures patients aren’t asked to repeat tests simply because data wasn’t accessible.
Usability is equally important. Systems should support multilingual access, mobile-friendly design, and clear explanations of clinical information so patients with different levels of digital literacy can understand what their results mean. Technology should remove friction from the care journey. Data that flows smoothly between providers — offering patients easy access to information they can understand — naturally makes healthcare more equitable.
Cameron Behar, Co-Founder and CTO at Sprinter Health
For decades, healthcare has operated on a necessary compromise: standardization in exchange for scale. Stock messages, uniform workflows, and averaged assumptions about patient needs, constraints, and preferences worked for most, but not all. Accounting for an individual’s unique circumstances was too slow and expensive. But the promise of modern AI isn’t just automation; it’s the end of that tradeoff.
Given clear goals and the right primitives, agentic systems can reason through novel patient situations without a specific feature having been built for them. They can learn context directly from patients through conversation, sidestepping the digital literacy barriers that traditional interfaces impose, and incorporate that context into care workflows in real time. The populations with the most complex, nonstandard circumstances no longer have to wait for their needs to make the product roadmap. Contextual intelligence offers the opportunity to turn good intentions around equity into operational reality.
Chris Santas, General Manager, Price Transparency and Search at MacroHealth
Can you imagine buying products on Amazon without knowing the prices? That is how most care is purchased today in the U.S. A patient goes to a clinic, a doctor’s office, or a hospital, and may check reviews, but there are usually few options to see the price of the care they’re about to receive. That’s changing. Health IT solutions are using mandated healthcare price-transparency data from health systems not only to optimize costs for health plans but also to share that data directly with patients. Healthcare is expensive. And any window into understanding the cost of care before making a healthcare decision improves the patient experience while also forcing the industry to adopt more streamlined, affordable pricing.
Jeanne Cohen, CEO at Motive Medical Intelligence
After 20 years of value-based care, it’s time to deliver on its promise, and technology and innovation are aiding progress. Patient experience and cost efficiency are not competing priorities — they are the same goal. By equipping clinicians with real-time, data-driven insights and a shared, standardized view of what ‘appropriateness care’ looks like, we can reduce unnecessary variation, eliminate waste, and ensure patients get the right care at the right time. That’s what patients feel: fewer delays, clearer communication, and care that actually makes sense — along with the confidence to take a more active role in their health. Technology is the catalyst, but the outcome is a system that is simpler to navigate, more consistent, and truly centered on the patient.
Karin Hayes, Senior Vice President, Analytics Products and Services at OptimizeRx
As healthcare becomes increasingly digital, disparities in digital literacy, device access, and connectivity risk leaving certain populations behind, creating a gap between what treatments are available and what patients can access. Nowhere is this more true than in accessing life-saving therapies.
For life sciences marketers, effective strategies to address these disparities go beyond broad assumptions to understand how specific patient populations engage with health information, what motivates them to act, what barriers they face, and the channels they prefer. This allows organizations to deliver more targeted, actionable communication through the patient journey. Technology is accelerating this shift and helping life sciences organizations close critical gaps in care.
For example, predictive analytics can anticipate future patient milestones to activate more personalized communications across both clinical workflows and digital channels. These timely, relevant communications can motivate patients to act sooner and help ensure prescribers are informed and prepared to treat. This coordinated approach drives more meaningful patient action, strengthens clinical readiness, and ultimately leads to improved engagement and better outcomes across diverse populations.
Eric Makovskey, EVP, Solutions at Tendo
One of the biggest barriers to equitable care is that health systems often lack visibility into where access challenges exist across different patient populations. Technology can help close that gap by bringing together data that highlights disparities in access, engagement, and outcomes. When organizations can identify where patients face barriers—whether related to geography, language, or socioeconomic factors—they can take more targeted action to improve access and support. The goal is not just to digitize healthcare, but to ensure that technology helps health systems reach patients more effectively and deliver care in ways that are accessible and inclusive.
Gokul Mohan, CEO at CareHarmony
Technology has a real opportunity to improve health equity, but only if it’s designed with the realities of diverse patient populations in mind. One of the biggest risks is relying on a one-size-fits-all approach, where digital tools assume every patient has the same access, preferences, or level of support. That kind of “cookie-cutter” care can actually widen gaps instead of closing them.
One of the most important roles technology plays is enabling more personalized, context-aware care. By incorporating social determinants of health alongside clinical and claims data, organizations can better understand the full picture of each patient. This allows care teams to tailor interventions based on individual needs, whether that means adjusting outreach methods, addressing barriers like transportation or food access, or aligning care plans with a patient’s environment and resources.
At the same time, technology alone isn’t enough. The most effective models combine data-driven insights with human care teams and flexible communication channels, so patients can engage in ways that work for them. This shift away from standardized care toward more tailored, patient-specific support is what ultimately drives more equitable outcomes. When done well, technology helps deliver the right care, in the right way, for each individual patient.
Lauren Barca, VP of Quality at 86Borders
Technology does its part in expanding access to care, especially for those patients who are harder to reach, but it can’t do it on its own. Many patients face challenges that go beyond healthcare, including transportation, housing, and language barriers. Supporting equity requires more than deploying new tools. Solutions need to be simple and easy to use, and they need to account for different levels of digital comfort. Technology can help identify needs and connect patients to resources, but real progress depends on meeting people where they are and making sure no one is left trying to figure it out alone.
Chandra Osborn, Chief Experience Officer at AdhereHealth
Technology can help close equity gaps, but only if it’s designed around how people actually live, not just how healthcare systems operate.
Forward-looking health IT solutions are using AI and behavioral insights to tailor communication based on language, preferences, and access to technology. That means meeting patients on the channels they’re comfortable with, simplifying complex health information, and identifying when someone may need more personalized support.
Importantly, technology should help care teams focus their attention where it’s needed most. By identifying patients who may be struggling – whether due to social barriers, affordability issues, or digital literacy challenges – health IT can ensure that human support is directed to the people who need it most.
Raj Ramaswamy, Chief Technology Officer at Buzz Health
Technology improves health equity when it surfaces actionable prescription options at the moment decisions are made—especially for patients navigating cost barriers, coverage confusion, or pharmacy variability. Advancing health equity isn’t just about access to care—it’s about access to understanding. Technology must simplify complexity, meet patients where they are, and empower them to make informed decisions about their health.
Jake McCarley, Co-Founder & CEO at Alluvium
Technology addresses health equity by providing enterprise intelligence that surfaces disparities in wait times, referral completion, and access patterns across patient populations, so leaders are no longer flying blind and can identify and address gaps proactively. Multi-channel access ensures all patients have equal opportunity to schedule care regardless of digital literacy, whether through web, mobile, or call centers, all seeing the same unified real-time availability across the entire network, including underserved geographic regions. The ability to allow for 24/7 scheduling removes barriers for shift workers and those unable to book during traditional business hours, while language customization options adapt to diverse community needs.
Casey Williams, Senior Vice President – Engagement, Analytics, and Payment Applications at RevSpring
Technology plays an important role in advancing health equity by helping healthcare organizations better understand the financial needs of diverse patient populations. By using data and analytics to personalize outreach, payment options, and financial assistance, healthcare staff can make conversations about cost of care more empathetic and aligned with each patient’s circumstances in an important step to address affordability barriers. Digital engagement tools that support multiple communication and payment channels, from text to phone to traditional methods, also help ensure accessibility for patients with varying levels of digital literacy. Ultimately, the goal is to use technology to meet patients where they are and make it easier to access and navigate care.
Dr. Joshua Tamayo-Sarver, MD, PhD, FACEP, FAMIA, Vice President of Innovation at Vituity & Inflect Health
Healthcare faces enormous cost pressure and persistent inefficiencies. While standardization is essential for improving efficiency, healthcare is also deeply personal. As systems become more standardized, many patients feel unseen or dehumanized, especially those from less-represented demographics or perspectives. When patients feel unseen, trust erodes. At the same time, rigid standardization on the supply side often forces patients to absorb the complexity of navigating the system, adapting themselves to how healthcare delivers services rather than the other way around. This creates a powerful opportunity for technology.
Technology can act as an intermediary between individual clinicians and an inflexible healthcare system. We’re seeing early examples through ambient and agentic tools for documentation, workflow, and administrative tasks. By lifting this burden from frontline staff, clinicians are free to focus on the person in front of them.
There is also promise to translate a patient’s context, concerns, and goals into the system while helping patients manage scheduling, insurance approvals, medication management, and denials. The beauty of today’s technology advances is that we can have a very bespoke experience and delivery mechanism for the patient on one side, with a very standardized experience for the health system on the other side.
As Maya Angelou noted, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” The goal is to return the focus of healthcare to the very human interaction of one person caring for another, while the technology puts in the hard work to make sure all the million other important things happen effortlessly in the background.
What great points to consider here! Huge thank you to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a quote to us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support.
What role do you think technology plays in addressing health equity, accessibility, and digital literacy among diverse patient populations? Let us know over on social media, we’d love to hear from all of you!
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