⚡ Quick Summary
This article explores the potential of Health Recommender Systems (HRS) to enhance health equity by personalizing health interventions and information. By adopting a socioecological perspective, the authors argue for a paradigm shift in HRS design to address structural barriers affecting health outcomes.
🔍 Key Details
- 📊 Focus: Health Recommender Systems (HRS)
- 🌍 Perspective: Socioecological model
- 🏥 Aim: Decrease health inequities
- 🔍 Challenges: Current HRS focus on individual behaviors
- 💡 Future Directions: Incorporate structural barriers and user experiences
🔑 Key Takeaways
- 📈 HRS have the potential to improve human-centered care and prevention.
- 🌐 They can provide personalized recommendations based on user preferences and broader social influences.
- 🚧 Current systems often overlook the lived experiences of users, particularly from marginalized backgrounds.
- 🔄 A new design paradigm is needed to integrate structural barriers into HRS.
- 📊 Evaluating health equity effects of HRS can influence policy changes.
- 🤝 Emphasizing health systems and decolonial perspectives can enhance well-being.
- 📉 Limited effectiveness of current HRS for low socioeconomic and racial/ethnic minority groups.
📚 Background
Health inequities remain a pressing issue in healthcare, often exacerbated by structural barriers such as access to care, social support, and availability of healthy food. Health Recommender Systems (HRS) have emerged as a promising tool to personalize health interventions, yet their design often fails to account for the complex socioecological factors that influence health outcomes.
🗒️ Study
The authors of this article analyze the role of HRS in promoting health equity through a socioecological lens. They discuss how these systems can be designed to not only cater to individual preferences but also to address the broader social determinants of health that impact various communities.
📈 Results
The analysis reveals that while HRS have the potential to target systemic challenges to health, they currently focus predominantly on individual behaviors. This limitation restricts their reach and effectiveness, particularly for individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds and racial or ethnic minority groups.
🌍 Impact and Implications
By shifting the design of HRS to incorporate structural barriers and the lived experiences of users, we can significantly enhance their effectiveness in promoting health equity. This approach not only addresses individual health factors but also the systemic issues that contribute to health disparities, ultimately leading to better health outcomes for all.
🔮 Conclusion
The findings of this study underscore the importance of rethinking how we design Health Recommender Systems. By focusing on health systems and integrating a socioecological perspective, HRS can play a crucial role in promoting health equity and addressing the structural barriers that hinder access to good health. The future of HRS holds great promise for transforming health care delivery and improving health outcomes across diverse populations.
💬 Your comments
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Designing Health Recommender Systems to Promote Health Equity: A Socioecological Perspective.
Abstract
Health recommender systems (HRS) have the capability to improve human-centered care and prevention by personalizing content, such as health interventions or health information. HRS, an emerging and developing field, can play a unique role in the digital health field as they can offer relevant recommendations, not only based on what users themselves prefer and may be receptive to, but also using data about wider spheres of influence over human behavior, including peers, families, communities, and societies. We identify and discuss how HRS could play a unique role in decreasing health inequities. We use the socioecological model, which provides representations of how multiple, nested levels of influence (eg, community, institutional, and policy factors) interact to shape individual health. This perspective helps illustrate how HRS could address not just individual health factors but also the structural barriers-such as access to health care, social support, and access to healthy food-that shape health outcomes at various levels. Based on this analysis, we then discuss the challenges and future research priorities. We find that despite the potential for targeting more complex systemic challenges to obtaining good health, current HRS are still focused on individual health behaviors, often do not integrate the lived experiences of users in the design, and have had limited reach and effectiveness for individuals from low socioeconomic status and racial or ethnic minoritized backgrounds. In this viewpoint, we argue that a new design paradigm is necessary in which HRS focus on incorporating structural barriers to good health in addition to user preferences. HRS should be designed with an emphasis on health systems, which also includes incorporating decolonial perspectives of well-being that challenge prevailing medical models. Furthermore, potential lies in evaluating the health equity effects of HRS and leveraging collected data to influence policy. With changes in practices and with an intentional equity focus, HRS could play a crucial role in health promotion and decreasing health inequities.
Author: [‘Figueroa CA’, ‘Torkamaan H’, ‘Bhattacharjee A’, ‘Hauptmann H’, ‘Guan KW’, ‘Sedrakyan G’]
Journal: J Med Internet Res
Citation: Figueroa CA, et al. Designing Health Recommender Systems to Promote Health Equity: A Socioecological Perspective. Designing Health Recommender Systems to Promote Health Equity: A Socioecological Perspective. 2025; 27:e60138. doi: 10.2196/60138