The National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved (NHIT), the first and oldest national non-profit focused on equitable access to health technology for underserved communities and communities of color, celebrated its 15th anniversary today with an in-person Health Equity Roundtable with key White House and administration officials. The discussion revolved around “The Promise of Health IT Innovation and Broadband for All” and took place at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C.
WASHINGTON, June 8, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — The National Health IT Collaborative for the Underserved (NHIT), the first and oldest national non-profit focused on equitable access to health technology for underserved communities and communities of color, celebrated its 15th anniversary today with an in-person Health Equity Roundtable with key White House and administration officials. The discussion revolved around “The Promise of Health IT Innovation and Broadband for All” and took place at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C.
Today’s event continues NHIT’s long track record of bringing together public, private, and academic leaders to accelerate progress towards the elimination of health disparities for underserved communities. Since its inception in 2008, NHIT has been instrumental in convening key stakeholders from the White House to Wall Street to engage in collaboration, innovation, and advocacy to improve healthcare access, quality, and outcomes for those who have historically been marginalized. Under the auspices of NHIT, executives from federal agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, have come together with leaders from community-based organizations (CBOs) and the private sector to strategize on how to best address critical goals like improving health IT infrastructure, expanding broadband access, promoting telehealth, advancing interoperability, addressing social determinants of health (SDoH), and enhancing data analytics for targeted interventions.
While marking its 15 years of community impact, NHIT is also focused on the future with the recent expansion of the NHIT Data Fusion Center in collaboration with Amazon Web Services and Tyler Technologies. The Center is a geography-based research platform that pulls together de-identified, aggregated, and publicly available data and tools that facilitate a granular understanding of SDoH the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age that affect a wide range of health risks and outcomes. The Center aggregates SDoH datasets from across federal, state, and local government agencies to enable data mapping and publish research insights on the platform.
“NHIT appreciates the way in which President Biden has made health equity a priority and how his public policy efforts reflect that from the way the budget is drafted to the hiring process at the agency level.” said Luis Belen, Chief Executive Officer of NHIT. He added, “If we are going to address the health equity gap, strategic investments are of great importance, but they cannot be at the expense of underserved communities. This Administration is breaking old molds and leading the way by ensuring that diverse communities are represented at the decision-making table, that investments in infrastructure are accompanied by both multicultural community outreach and engagement in both urban and rural areas and include investment in the community-based organizations that are on the frontlines of outreach efforts, and by addressing equity in areas of data collection, competitive grants, diversity among researchers, and procurement. NHIT has advocated for this approach for 15 years, and we are immensely proud to work side by side with the Biden Administration to go from conception to execution.”
About NHIT:
NHIT is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization on a mission to provide equitable access to health technologies and to make sure that these technologies address the needs of underserved communities and communities of color. Since its founding in 2008, NHIT has worked to advance health equity and economic viability on issues such as broadband access, electronic health records, precision medicine, consumer health applications and disaster resiliency. NHIT has collaborated with Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Tyler Technologies to launch the NHIT Data Fusion Center, to tackle and translate social determinants of health (SDoH) data into actionable insights. For more information, visit https://www.nhit.org.
Media Contact
Luis Belen, NHIT, 1 2027142542, [email protected]
SOURCE NHIT
