Creating Fairness—A Nexus Approach to Designing Healthcare Equity

Equitable health delivery remains a crisis that challenges both global and local (AKA glocal) healthcare policy and health service providers. Bridging to health equity requires creative use of innovative solutions and ethical change management, through a multidisciplinary approach. This chapter discusses a nexus approach to these and to leveraging new technologies, social drivers of health data, and healthcare cultural factors to develop targeted, sustainable, interventions which address health equity through interlinked innovations that are designed to be patient-oriented-effectively communicated, accepted, integrated, and adopted across multiple stakeholders. The promise of prospective care for health, such as preventative health care and personalized health care, frames the thoughtful evaluation of service design knowledge and perspectives developed in the last decade and permits examination of synergistic solutions that may also prove effective in reducing health disparities and health-related costs. Such context-sensitive health service design should inform future efforts toward health equity through the application of new and emerging technology (such as artificial intelligence or virtual care), the further refinement of best practices in ethical change management, and through the rise of emergent organizational structures. Finding a way from the present insupportable health equity crises to an improved future state will require health care policy makers and healthcare organizations prepared to lead the way in creating enabling policies and collaborations, adaptive infrastructure, patient-centered service designs, and new types of health-related institutions in a contemporized, solution-driven, healthcare environment.