Designing Digital Health That Reaches Everyone
From e-Health26 Track: No Patient Left Behind: Building Digital Health For All
Digital health innovation only delivers meaningful impact when it improves care for the people who have historically faced the greatest barriers to accessing it. As healthcare systems continue to evolve, equity can’t remain a secondary consideration, but must be built into how technologies, workflows, and services are designed from the start. The No Patient Left Behind Track at e-Health26 explores how organizations are using digital transformation to close gaps in access, and create more inclusive models of care.
Session highlights
One of the clearest examples of this work can be seen in emergency care pathways for patients with Sickle Cell Disease. In Every Minute Counts – Accelerating Emergency Sickle Cell Care through Digital Transformation, Tanya Louca and Vithu Kugathasan (North York General Hospital) examine how collaboration between patients, advocates, and clinical teams helped redesign care processes across multiple hospitals. By leveraging digital transformation initiatives to improve access to safe and equitable treatment, the work led to measurable reductions in wait times for assessment and care. This helped address longstanding disparities experienced by Black patients navigating emergency systems.
The Track also highlights how digital tools can support more proactive and trauma-informed care for underserved populations. In A Scalable, Digitally Enabled, Trauma-Informed Approach to Cancer Screening in Long-Stay Psychiatric Inpatients, Tania Tajirian (CAMH) explores how electronic health record integration is being used to improve breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer screening among psychiatric inpatients with serious mental illness. Through a co-designed and trauma-informed approach, the initiative demonstrates how preventive care can be embedded more effectively into psychiatric settings while reducing longstanding screening disparities.
Beyond specific technologies, meaningful progress also depends on culture and organizational readiness. From Pain Points to Progress: Building a Culture of Innovation in Long-Term and Community Care, presented by Derrick Bernardo (Broadmead Care), looks at how innovation can emerge from lived experience when staff are empowered to test, learn, and co-design solutions. This results in an environment that encourages experimentation and collaboration, since the organization developed a model for more inclusive and sustainable care improvement across long-term and community care settings.
Together, these sessions reinforce a shared message: equitable digital health requires more than access to technology alone. It demands systems that are designed with patients, grounded in lived experience, and responsive to the realities of the communities they serve.
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Discover more insightful sessions highlighting the latest in digital health innovation through the e-Health26 Agenda. Use the colour-coded filters to refine your view and register for the conference if you haven’t yet.
