Health equity is a long-term concern in healthcare delivery. The 2001 Institute of Medicine (IOM) Report entitled “Crossing the quality chasm: A new health system for the 21st century” listed health equity as one of its six aims. Health informatics has often focused on aims set out in this IOM Report. Yet, healthcare equity has received less attention until more recent efforts, such as the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) 2019 special issue on health equity, the digital health equity-themes Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) Symposium at the AMIA 2021 conference, the AMIA Social Determinants of Health Discussion Forum, and the recently-launched Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) Program.
To build upon and institutionalize this growing momentum in the health informatics field, the proposed AMIA “Health and Healthcare Equity Working Group” will be dedicated to bringing together health informaticists to learn, share, and collaborate on research and professional practice on health equity and the social determinants of health. This working group will provide an ongoing infrastructure for networking, training, exchange and dissemination of relevant scholarship, policy and practice. Together, members of this group will advocate for health equity’s centrality to the wider discipline of health informatics, while building specialized knowledge and expertise about the social determinants of health, community-engaged research and practice, and how informatics can address—or worsen— health and healthcare disparities.