It’s been well established that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption and use of digital health tools. But now, stakeholders must figure out just how to take that increased utilization to address issues in healthcare, namely equity and accessibility.

To help answer these questions, the Morehouse School of Medicine teamed up with United Health Foundation Partners to conduct the Digital Health Tools Study, which assessed how primary care providers, especially those in rural or underserved areas, use health technology and how they feel about it.

Two of the survey’s facilitators, Megan Douglas, an assistant professor and health policy director at the Morehouse School of Medicine, and Dominic Mack, a professor of family medicine and director at the Morehouse School of Medicine, convened at HIMSS21 to discuss their findings and their potential uses.

“I think really at the essence of this study and a lot of the work that we’ve done here is ... the tool in the hands of the clinicians that are serving underserved patient populations, and are they accessible to those clinicians?” Douglas said.

The survey included responses from more than 1,100 clinicians across states like Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky. Nearly all (99%) of respondents say they have used digital health tools in their practice over the last five years.

Of those digital health tools, telehealth and electronic health records were used by the most providers (65%) followed by patient portals (50%), health information exchanges (45%), prescription drug monitoring programs (40%), remote monitoring programs (30%) and wearable devices (20%).

As previously noted, the pandemic played a significant role in digital health adoption, with 90% of respondents reporting using digital tools because of COVID-19 and 54% saying they used telehealth for the first time during the pandemic.

Factors such as ease of workflow integration, patient need and incentives from the government played into providers’ adoption of digital health, according to the survey.

Despite these enabling factors, providers also reported cost, time, lack of payer reimbursement and limited workflow integration as barriers to adoption.

These findings demonstrate that, while adoption and satisfaction of digital health tools have significantly increased in recent months, there are still persisting challenges, according to the speakers.

“I think one of the challenges that we hear over and over again that is still occurring is interoperability of the systems,” Mack said. “And then with the health equity implications, we talk about [how] the digital divide continues to pose a barrier.”

As Morehouse disseminates these findings with stakeholders, it hopes they can be used to devise a plan to overcome the barriers of adoption and to surmount the persisting challenges.

“This is a start, first to evaluate the discrepancies, the disparities that are out there,” Mack said. “Our next step is actually to attempt to develop a plan on how to overcome these barriers.”

He says that this and other studies can uncover the restraints to healthcare that underserved communities face. That way, when companies build tools moving forward, they can better address the needs of these patient populations.

On the policy side, Douglas hopes these findings can lead legislatures to take a health equity approach to new laws.

“What we’re planning on doing is providing [the policymakers in these states] with snapshots of some of the health and wellness disparities within their states and also snapshots of the survey data as the foundation for conversations around what policies are currently in place, what may be contributing to some of the barriers and facilitators, and how, as policymakers, do they react to the survey data and how would they take action to improve the environments that these clinicians are serving in,” she said.

Going forward, Douglas says it’s about putting health equity front and center for both legislatures and health technology innovators.