Informatics for All: Broadening Who Builds, Benefits, and Belongs
As informatics and AI reshape health and healthcare, an essential question remains: Who benefits, and who risks being left behind?
The rise of AI has raised further concerns that large, well-funded academic medical centers will be able to take advantage of the potential opportunities of AI in healthcare, but that many other organizations and populations may not be able to fully benefit from the AI revolution. While considerable informatics research has focused on tools for low resource environments, those projects have often focused on low resource environments in other parts of the world, not those in the US.
Join ACMI Fellows for a thought-provoking retreat focused on expanding who can build, use, and benefit from biomedical and health informatics. Together, we will examine how informatics can better support groups, communities and care settings that have historically lacked resources, representation, or access to digital innovation.
The program will explore how informatics can advance health and well-being in communities that face barriers to accessing resources, services, opportunities, or technology. Discussions will consider a wide range of community contexts and organizational settings, recognizing that needs and challenges vary across populations and regions.
Some potential groups that risk being left behind in the AI revolution include:
- Rural and Frontier healthcare
- FQHCs and other care providers for poor and underserved populations.
- Tribal groups and care providers that have non-Eurocentric data ownership frameworks
- Any other group that experiences inequitable allocation of health-related resources.
In addition, individuals from these populations tend to be under-represented in the informatics community, both in research and practice. To address the needs of these communities, it will be important to engage and train more informaticians from these groups.
Featured Plenary
Stephanie Carroll, University of Arizona, will deliver the plenary address on Indigenous data governance and data sovereignty. Dr. Stephanie Carroll is Ahtna/Dene and of Sicilian-descent. She is Associate Professor of Public Health and Associate Research Professor at the Udall Center and its Native Nations Institute, University of Arizona. She co-directs the Indigenous Data Alliance and directs the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance. Stephanie co-led the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and the 2890-2025 IEEE Recommended Practice for Provenance of Indigenous Peoples' Data. She co-founded the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network and the Global Indigenous Data Alliance.
Program Focus
We will be seeking talks and panels that address technical, architectural, financial, ethical or other topics related to developing, implementing, evaluating, and sustaining beneficial informatics interventions for these underserved populations, as well as educational and career programs to increase the number of members from these communities who select informatics as a career. Some topic areas could include:
- AI and digital health in under-resourced care environments
- Community-engaged design, implementation, and evaluation
- Informatics in rural, frontier, urban underserved, public health, safety-net, and federally qualified health center settings
- Data quality and representation for populations whose experiences may be poorly captured in current systems, including
- structural, social, cultural, and environmental drivers of health
- Tribal Data Sovereignty, Indigenous data governance, and community control of data
- Workforce development and expanded pathways into informatics for health professionals and community members from groups historically underrepresented in informatics
- Sustainable partnerships, trust, and shared benefit
- Policy, financial, ethical, and operational barriers to equitable innovation
We are seeking problem definitions, proposal for solutions, theoretical discussion, and descriptions of actual programs addressing these areas.
A Working Retreat
The goal is not only to discuss the current problems, but more importantly to develop proposals, white papers, collaborations and initiatives to address these challenges.
We look forward to welcoming you to Phoenix.