“To help bring members and parents back to preventive care, our Board in early 2021 approved a text messaging program in partnership with ConsejoSano. The program allows us to easily notify parents when children are due for preventive visits—and relieve that notification burden from our PCP offices and IPA provider relations staff.” From “Using Texting & Data Mining to Improve Pediatric Care,” by James Slaggert, CEO, Children First Medical Group, in the Journal of America’s Physician Groups. (Summer 2021)

If the last few years are any indication, healthcare is embracing the promise of digital. Few things on this planet make our team more excited than the opportunities of digital health coming to fruition. However, as we celebrate digital health’s progress, we also see a long road ahead. Abner Mason, Founder and CEO of ConsejoSano, says, “We can’t solve a problem that we can’t see. Healthcare organizations could leverage race, ethnicity, and language data to understand where and in what language to reach patients, who’s at risk, and how to step in. But none of that is possible if we fail to gather the data.”

Digital literacy begins with actually engaging patients in their language of preference. Read more about his ideas on meeting people where they are, as well as aligning incentives with equity, in this Techonomy article, “The Time to Prioritize Digital Health Equity is Now.”