Co-Development of Telehealth, Remote Patient Monitoring, and AI-based Tools for Inclusive Technology-Facilitated Healthcare Work of the Future

As the use of digital health technologies grows, gaps between the potential of new technologies, existing healthcare practices, and workers’ preparedness for new technologies limit the potential of digital health to achieve acceptance and effective utilization at scale. This transition to scale research project views inclusion as a key driver of scale in future technology-facilitated healthcare work.

Inclusive technology for healthcare work will enable workers in diverse roles and skills to leverage increasing access to data-driven technologies. The project focuses on the growth of Data-Intensive Technologies (DIT), which include telehealth and AI-based tools. The project’s approach to transition to scale centers on alleviating existing misalignment between current healthcare work and data-intensive technologies in three ways.

First is through the co-development of tools and generalizable design principles with users that lower the barrier to technology integration for healthcare workers. Second is by empowering individuals within healthcare systems who have diverse roles to adopt and use the tools and improve their skills. Third is to enable patient-centered healthcare that promotes autonomy and strengthens clinician-patient concordance.

The project represents a multi-institutional commitment to transitioning innovative healthcare to scale, through DIT facilitated inclusion of diverse workers in healthcare systems across the U.S., which together encompass over 1000 care sites in U.S. 24 states, multiple work roles, and different levels of training and hierarchy.

This project brings together several scientific fields, including human-computer interaction, health informatics, artificial intelligence (AI), sensing, medicine, organizational behavior, and research on diversity and inclusion. The investigator team is structured to achieve multiple convergent goals such as quantifying the impacts of scaling DIT on inclusive healthcare work and modelling prescription and adoption of DIT towards inclusive deployment at scale.

Additionally, the investigators seek to identify generalizable DIT design principles for inclusive healthcare work at scale, and to develop theory and tools to facilitate at-scale inclusion through DIT-based patient-provider concordance. Finally, the project expects to develop tools and practices for lowering barriers to comprehension of and engagement with DIT by diverse healthcare workers; to create AI-based team-focused tools; and to analyze the opportunities and challenges in using AI for diverse healthcare teams’ work.

This project has been funded by the NSF Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier cross-directorate program to promote deeper basic understanding of the interdependent human-technology partnership in work contexts by advancing design of intelligent work technologies that operate in harmony with human workers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.