A cluster which included the Schools of Information, Nursing, Pharmacy, Public Health along with the department of Learning Health Sciences in the Medical School joined together to answer a new university-wide call for Anti-Racism Faculty Hiring Initiative proposals. Their submission, built around using informatics and data science methods to detect, understand, and reduce structural racism within healthcare, and racial healthcare disparities, was recently selected for funding.
“This is an outstanding opportunity for DLHS to more explicitly address issues of racism and bias in data, algorithms, and informatics-driven interventions that may not have been recognized or prioritized before the summer of 2020," explained Cheryl Moyer, DLHS' Associate Chair for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. "We are grateful to the Provost for making this opportunity available.”
These five new faculty members added across their five units will address multiple levels of racism focusing on the following themes;
(1) Racial bias and unintended racist consequences in data, algorithms, and technologies that enable healthcare;
(2) The intersection of racial residential segregation with healthcare access, quality, safety, and health outcomes;
(3) Data-driven, anti-racist, health policy analysis regarding racial disparities in health insurance, healthcare access, quality, and safety;
(4) Healthcare provider education and point-of-care informatics interventions to reduce providers’ implicit racial biases and enhance their structural competence; and
(5) Community-driven, technology-enabled models of healthcare delivery that address racism as a social determinant of health and empower racialized communities in service/intervention design.
