How Mind the Gap Explores Digital Health Equity: A Reader's Guide

Digital health equity isn't a single story—it's a complex web of past decisions, present realities, and future possibilities. Each strand requires different ways of thinking, different lenses for analysis, and different types of evidence to understand properly.

That's why Mind the Gap uses five distinct article types, each designed to illuminate different aspects of how technology intersects with health justice. Think of them as different tools in a research toolkit, each optimized for particular kinds of understanding.

Contemporary Viewpoint: Making Sense of Right Now

When artificial intelligence transforms consulting overnight, or when a new health technology promises to "revolutionize" care delivery, we need frameworks to understand what's really happening beneath the headlines. Contemporary Viewpoint pieces take current developments—often sparked by something I've read or observed—and examine their equity implications through the lens of global health research.

These aren't breaking news analyses, but deeper dives into the patterns and power dynamics that shape how innovations spread and who benefits from them. When everyone else is asking "how fast?" or "how much?", these pieces ask "who's included?" and "what could go wrong?"

History in Context: Learning from Those Who Came Before

The most profound insights about today's digital health challenges often come from understanding how previous generations solved similar problems. History in Context pieces tell the stories of unlikely heroes—like the dentist and radiologist who computerized medicine, or the farm boy who decoded how innovations spread.

These narrative pieces, sometimes developed as mini-series, reveal patterns that repeat across decades and technologies. They show us that the equity challenges we face aren't entirely new, and neither are the solutions. By understanding how Everett Rogers mapped innovation diffusion in 1950s Iowa, we better understand why AI adoption varies so dramatically across health systems today.

Field Notes: Insights from the Ground

After fifteen years building research partnerships between Canadian and African institutions, I've witnessed how digital health innovations actually work (or don't) in real-world settings. Field Notes pieces draw on this direct experience to examine the gap between what we think happens and what actually happens when technology meets complex health systems.

These pieces might explore why a promising mHealth intervention thrived in one context but failed in another, or how capacity-building efforts evolved differently than planned. They're less about proving points than about sharing honest observations from someone who's been in the room where decisions get made.

Partnership Perspectives: Unpacking North-South Dynamics

Global health partnerships are evolving rapidly as digital tools reshape how knowledge is created, shared, and applied. Partnership Perspectives pieces examine these changing dynamics—how AI affects the balance of expertise between Northern and Southern institutions, how digital platforms change the economics of collaboration, or how new technologies challenge traditional assumptions about capacity and capability.

These analyses matter because the structure of global health partnerships ultimately determines whose voices shape health policy and whose innovations reach scale. As the landscape shifts, we need clear thinking about how to build more equitable forms of collaboration.

Digital Health Futures: Navigating What's Coming

While Contemporary Viewpoint pieces analyze what's happening now, Digital Health Futures pieces look ahead to examine emerging technologies and their potential implications for health equity. These aren't predictions so much as explorations—thought experiments that help us prepare for different scenarios.

A Digital Health Futures piece might explore how quantum computing could affect health data privacy, or how advances in natural language processing might change the dynamics of multilingual health communication. The goal isn't to forecast the future but to think through the equity implications of different technological trajectories while we still have time to influence them.

The Reader Journey

Different readers will gravitate toward different article types based on their interests and needs. Practitioners might prefer Field Notes and Partnership Perspectives for their practical insights. Policymakers might focus on Contemporary Viewpoint and Digital Health Futures pieces for strategic thinking. Researchers might appreciate History in Context pieces for theoretical grounding.

But the real value emerges when these perspectives combine. Understanding how consulting's AI transformation affects health equity (Contemporary Viewpoint) becomes richer when you know how previous waves of health innovation spread unevenly (History in Context), how technology adoption actually works in resource-constrained settings (Field Notes), how it affects North-South research partnerships (Partnership Perspectives), and what it might mean for future collaboration models (Digital Health Futures).

Building Collective Understanding

Digital health equity requires multiple ways of knowing. We need the pattern recognition that comes from historical analysis, the grounded insights that emerge from field experience, the critical thinking that contemporary events demand, the systems perspective that partnership analysis provides, and the anticipatory thinking that futures work enables.

No single article type can capture this complexity alone. But together, they create a more complete picture—one that honours both the technical possibilities and the human realities that determine whether digital health innovations serve justice or perpetuate existing inequities.

The goal isn't just to understand these dynamics better, but to equip ourselves and others to shape them more thoughtfully. In a field moving as rapidly as digital health, that kind of multi-faceted understanding is critical.