# Bridging the divide in digital therapeutics (DTx): Partnership strategies for broader representation across DTx development and deployment

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework and tool to make digital health tools more inclusive by valuing both personal and professional expertise in their development.

## Contribution

A novel theoretical framework and practical worksheet for integrating diverse forms of expertise in DTx development.

## Key findings

- Traditional DTx development hierarchies prioritize formal credentials over lived experience.
- The DTx Team Building Worksheet helps teams dynamically assess and value different types of expertise.
- Explicitly addressing status dynamics can lead to more equitable and effective digital health tools.

## Abstract

While Digital Therapeutics (DTx) are widely considered a key strategy to reach certain populations with unmet healthcare needs, a range of differences in the impact and adoption of DTx still exists. These differences are not just rooted in access, but also in gaps in knowledge about how to produce community-relevant DTx, primarily stemming from the implicit or explicit exclusion of those with both relevant trained expertise (gained through formal education or professional experience) and lived expertise (gained through personal and direct experience). This paper expands the traditional conceptualization of the digital divide beyond access to encompass four interconnected domains: the Digital Knowledge Divide, Digital Evidence Generation Divide, Digital Production Divide, and Digital Adoption Divide. Drawing on Ridgeway’s cultural schema theory of status, we demonstrate how conventional team hierarchies in DTx development systematically allocate status and decision-making authority through automatic cultural defaults, credentials, professional roles, demographic characteristics, rather than through contextual assessment of who possesses the most relevant expertise for specific decisions. To address this challenge, we propose a theoretical framework for dynamic expertise integration that deliberately disrupts rapid-stabilizing hierarchies by creating explicit relational spaces where teams can recognize and value both lived and trained expertise contextually. We operationalize this framework through the DTx Team Building Worksheet, a practical tool that integrates team science approaches with Community-Led Transformation principles and Culturally and Community Responsive Design. The Worksheet provides structured processes for assessing diverse forms of expertise, defining roles dynamically, and identifying decision-making priorities that shift appropriately across the DTx lifecycle. This integrated approach including problem analysis, theoretical framework, and practical tool, offers a pathway toward more equitable DTx development by enabling teams to make status dynamics explicit, expand what counts as expertise, and establish new consensual norms about contextually-appropriate status allocation. We invite stakeholders across sectors to test and refine these tools in diverse contexts, recognizing that creating equitable DTx requires sustained commitment to partnerships that genuinely honor multiple forms of expertise and willingness to disrupt comfortable hierarchies in service of producing interventions truly designed for and with the communities they aim to serve.

In recent years, digital health tools like Digital Therapeutics (DTx) have gained attention as a promising way to support health behaviors across different communities. However, there are still major gaps in how well these tools serve diverse populations. The problem isn’t just about who has access to technology, it’s about who gets to shape how these tools are designed and whose knowledge is valued in the development process. DTx development teams often automatically give more decision-making power to people with formal credentials while overlooking the essential expertise that comes from actually living with a health condition or navigating real-world barriers to care. We offer a practical strategy to address this gap: a worksheet-based method that helps teams recognize and value both lived expertise (knowledge from personal experience) and trained expertise (knowledge from formal education). The key insight is that the most relevant type of expertise changes depending on what decision is being made. By making these decisions more transparent and dynamic, teams can create digital health tools that actually work for the people who need them most. We’ve seen this approach succeed in our own collaborations outside of DTx, and we’re inviting others to try it and help build a future where digital health tools genuinely serve everyone.