Healthcare Technology Featured Article

March 20, 2012

Civil Rights Group Collecting Data to Support its Position on Health Reform Constitutionality


You’d have to be living under a rock not to know that the constitutionality of the nation’s healthcare reform effort, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), will be argued next week in front of the Supreme Court.

To prepare for this, one of the country’s largest civil rights coalitions wants litigants and justices alike to remember what the act is set up to do – provide healthcare to people who can’t afford it, including minority communities, according to a press release from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCR).

The LCCR, which filed an amicus brief in favor of the act’s constitutionality in January, announced today it has collected “data from a variety of sources supporting their argument that the ACA advances equal opportunity for millions of Americans,” according to the press release.

The organization reports that the “burdens of costly health care are not distributed evenly,” but fall disproportionately on populations already having problems providing for themselves and their families, and which “are (also) more likely to experience higher rates of unemployment, to have jobs that do not provide health insurance, and to have lower incomes that put higher insurance premiums out of their financial reach.”

Patients’ access to good healthcare is increasingly becoming dependent on their ability to communicate effectively with their health practitioners, and today those ways are more and more tied to mobile health. “The health of Hispanics and other minority populations can be improved by accessing mobile devices to receive vital health messages, monitor their conditions, and receive other health-related wireless interventions,” the Web site reports. 

Nearly 26 million Americans have diabetes, and racial and ethnic minorities continue to have higher rates of diabetes than other groups, according to studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as posted by the US Office of Minority Health.

African Americans, particularly inner-city residents, are likely to be medically underserved, without access to constant provider monitoring, making those who have diabetes at risk for heart disease and death, reports state.

African-Americans and Hispanics use their cell and smartphones more than whites. So why not use these devices to equalize the healthcare gap?

AT&T recently provided approximately 150 smartphones with voice and data plans for underserved minority patients, diabetes and educators in Texas to see if having remote access to clinicians helped them monitor their diabetes better, according to the Office of Minority Health.

Those with higher incomes have long been using telehealth, or remote healthcare devices, to monitor everything from diabetes to dialysis.

To try to even things out, the USDA announced in December that it would give out grants to those living in rural, underserved areas of the country to get access to healthcare through telemedicine. Telemedicine allows patients to visit physicians remotely, live over video, for immediate care or to capture and store video or still images. Patient data obtained this way is then stored and sent to physicians for diagnosis and follow-up treatment at a later time.

This won’t solve all the problems of the underserved, of course, but it’s a start, and we’ll all just have to wait and see what the Supreme Court has to say about healthcare reform that would allow all in this country to have insurance, and equal access to doctors, whether through technology or in other ways.





Edited by Jennifer Russell
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