Making Hidden Bias Visible: Designing a Feedback Ecosystem for Primary Care Providers

TL;DR

This paper presents a design for an ecosystem that provides real-time feedback to primary care providers to help them recognize and reflect on implicit biases in communication with marginalized patients, aiming to reduce healthcare disparities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel feedback ecosystem with wireframes that visualize communication metrics to make implicit bias explicit for providers in primary care.

Findings

Wireframes display real-time communication metrics.

The ecosystem promotes provider reflection on implicit bias.

First design iteration for bias awareness tool.

Abstract

Implicit bias may perpetuate healthcare disparities for marginalized patient populations. Such bias is expressed in communication between patients and their providers. We design an ecosystem with guidance from providers to make this bias explicit in patient-provider communication. Our end users are providers seeking to improve their quality of care for patients who are Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and/or Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ). We present wireframes displaying communication metrics that negatively impact patient-centered care divided into the following categories: digital nudge, dashboard, and guided reflection. Our wireframes provide quantitative, real-time, and conversational feedback promoting provider reflection on their interactions with patients. This is the first design iteration toward the development of a tool to raise providers' awareness of their own implicit biases.