Digital Health Equity Lab (DHEL)

The Digital Health Equity Lab investigates how digital technologies—including patient portals, telehealth, electronic health records, wearables, and AI-based tools—are reshaping communication between patients and clinicians, and what that means for health equity. Combining qualitative, computational, and participatory methods, the lab examines how these technologies are used, imagined, designed, and governed in everyday clinical and community settings.

Our research is grounded in partnerships with primary care sites and community organizations across New Jersey. Active projects address how structural conditions shape what patients and clinicians envision technology can do; how language and algorithmic systems produce uneven access to health information; and how participatory design can make digital tools more responsive to the people they are meant to serve.

The lab collaborates closely with colleagues at Rutgers' School of Health Professions, School of Public Health, and Department of Computer Science, and with researchers and community partners in New Jersey, the U.S., and Europe.