As part of AcademyHealth’s Paradigm Project, volunteer “design teams” spent two years generating and testing innovations to disrupt the status quo in health services research. Teams leveraged the tools of human-centered design (HCD) to address structural challenges facing the field, such as barriers to studying the questions of interest to decision-makers, getting the evidence to end-users in a timely, accessible way, and addressing long-standing issues of inequity and bias in the workforce and methods.
One Design Team was tasked with addressing the challenge of building the field’s capacity to effectively harness new and emerging data sources and methods. The team developed a tool that prompts researchers to identify and mitigate sources of bias potentially perpetuated in their studies that rely on big data. Unless researchers take intentional steps to avoid perpetuating bias, their use and interpretation of such data sets may automatically reinforce existing, harmful stereotypes.
Watch the video below to learn more about the tool and lessons learned through the refinement and testing process.
Learn more about the larger movement to advance more timely, impactful research, and the other four innovations resulting from the Paradigm Project: