How Digitization Will Help Reduce Health Inequalities Through Culturally ABS Linguistically Competent AI-Driven Solutions
Have you ever found yourself at the doctor, struggling to help be understood as you attempt to communicate your ailments or needs? If you haven’t, you can consider yourself one of the lucky ones. But if you have, then you know just how stressful and dangerous cultural incompetence can be to patients around the world.
Cultural and linguistic competency challenges in the health care sector are persistent and can have an effect on a large percentage of UK patients seeking help from a healthcare professional. The UK is an incredibly diverse part of the world, which is why diversity and inclusion are so crucial to the health care sector.
Cultural competence plays a crucial role in patients receiving the best healthcare possible. It is defined as having the ability to effectively communicate, understand, and interact with
people of different cultures. In healthcare, cultural competence should include:
- Evident efforts to understand the patient’s individual needs
- An understanding of the meaning of culture
- Understanding when there is a need for language interpretation and providing it
- Continued learning and training to continue gaining cultural competence
Linguistic competence is defined as an organization’s ability to communicate, relay information, and interact effectively with people of diverse backgrounds, languages, and literacy skills. Linguistic competence plays just as important a role in providing patients with the healthcare they need and deserve as cultural competence does.
Healthcare organizations must keep linguistic competence in mind for doctor-patient communication, documents that need to be filled out, signage, health education, public awareness campaigns, and more. In healthcare, linguistic competence should include interpretation services and advocates, as well as materials that have been tested for linguistic and cultural competency.
If a patient is unable to receive the treatment they require due to their doctor’s lack of competence in their culture and language; they are put at risk of not receiving the proper healthcare. A lack of cultural and linguistic competence can leave healthcare patients, providers, workers, and organizations stressed and at risk for costly mistakes. As digitization begins to play a more significant part in the healthcare field, it is the hope of patients around the world that cultural competence will become a given rather than a worry.
The Dangers of a Lack in Cultural Competency within the Healthcare Field
Doctors who have not developed cultural competence in their patient’s particular culture are placing the patient at risk of being unable to receive the help that they need. There is a lot of needs a patient must be able to effectively communicate and discuss with their doctor, including their ailments, symptoms, cultural, religious, or personal boundaries, and treatment options.
When a doctor is unable to understand and interact with their patient properly, they may miss an important diagnosis, cross a boundary that is important to their patient, or leave the patient feeling traumatized and fearful of pursuing the help of a healthcare professional in the future.
The Importance of Inclusion in Digitization
Healthcare inequalities in the UK health sector based on a patient’s ethnicity have been found to occur in large numbers in the past. With the development of technology rapidly growing and the COVID-19 pandemic creating a greater need to move many aspects of a patient’s life online, digitization has become a priority in many healthcare organizations. As digitization is taking on a more prominent role in the healthcare field, incorporating inclusion in digitization is greater than ever. One survey found that 81% of healthcare executives report that the pace of digitization within their organization is quickly accelerating, with 93% reporting that their organization is pursuing digital transformation with urgency. These numbers mean that the digitization of healthcare will soon be a key player in the majority of patients’ healthcare services.
As patients from all over the UK are granted easier access to receiving healthcare, a wider variety of cultures, languages and special needs should be brought into consideration of healthcare organizations’ pursuit of digital transformation.
Incorporating cultural competence in the digitization of healthcare will benefit patients all over the UK- and, eventually, the world. Patients will receive greater peace of mind knowing that they will be receiving the healthcare they need and deserve. Their ailments, pains, and complaints will more likely be heard. Important, life-saving diagnoses will be less likely to go unnoticed. Their personal, cultural, or religious boundaries will be respected, protecting their mental health as their overall health is cared for.
Healthcare organizations will benefit from incorporating cultural competence in digitization, as well. Their patient’s treatments will be of higher quality and more efficient, saving them from unnecessary costs, reducing care disparities, and improving their reputation for providing the best healthcare possible. The digitization that is developed with cultural and linguistic competence in mind will provide healthcare organizations, workers, and patients with greater peace of mind.
How Culturally ABS Linguistically Competent AI-Driven Solutions Can Help
Healthcare digitization will benefit healthcare organizations, healthcare providers, and patients around the world, especially when that digitization has been developed with cultural and linguistic differences in mind. Taking healthcare online will ensure that a wider variety of patients, such as those who do not feel comfortable going into a doctor’s office or are unable to find a way to get to a doctor, are able to receive healthcare when they need it. This means that a wider variety of people from all different backgrounds will have better access to healthcare.
Culturally ABS Linguistically Competent AI-Driven Solutions will be a great way to ensure that these patients from different backgrounds are receiving the best healthcare possible. These AI-driven solutions are designed to ensure that patients are heard and respected, no matter where they come from, what language they speak, or the culture from which they have derived. The solutions are developed to ensure the utmost cultural and linguistically competent healthcare.
This means that each of these solutions is developed to encourage deeper respect for diversity, self-awareness in healthcare providers, effective management of differences in culture, and cultural knowledge.
That’s why Fungai Ndemera has made it her mission to help reduce health inequalities by creating a culturally and linguistically competent one-stop AI-driven hybrid care delivery platform, known as CheckUp Health. In this platform, she has combined remote monitoring in-home, offering connectivity points to clinicians and professionals, empowering the patient to take control with a secure app for personal health tracking and monitoring, medication ordering, storage of personal health records and reducing the need to see a doctor.
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