About the Health Equity SIG
There is incredible public health potential for developing digital health services. Such services can be easily integrated into people’s lives, emphasizing its potential to extend reach, maximize impact, and overcome health inequities. However, underserved and marginalized communities have not been well represented in the digital health literature to date, and thus, many digital health services have not been designed to meet the needs of individuals who would benefit most from increased access to healthcare. This proposal to form a new SIG within SDMH arises out of an interest in centering populations who most experience health disparities, but have not been well-served by, or included in design and testing of, digital behavioral health interventions to date (e.g., youth and elders, women, BIPOC, LGBTQ, rural communities) and/or populations who are otherwise not reached by digital behavioral health interventions. Our vision for centering health equity in digital behavioral health involves the meaningful inclusion of communities and end-users throughout the process of intervention conceptualization, development, testing, implementation, and dissemination, and advocating for the needs of these communities and users with payers and policymakers. If you are interested in joining the Health Equity SIG, please contact SDMH at info@societydmh.org.
Health Equity SIG Leadership
Qinxin Shi, Ph.D
CO-CHAIR
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Texas Christian University
Aubrey Rhodes, Ph.D
CO-CHAIR
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Informatics, King’s College London; Junior Research Fellow, Linacre College, University of Oxford
Yexinyu “Yolanda” Yang, M.A.
Student Co-CHAIR
Clinical Psychology Doctoral Candidate, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Rawan Iriqat, M.P.H.
Student Co- Chair
Graduate Researcher, Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health, UC San Diego