What is the name of your organization?
Cultural Infusion
What is the name of your solution?
Diversity Atlas
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Diversity Atlas provides a world-first definition and measurement of cultural diversity.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Melbourne VIC, Australia
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
AUS
What type of organization is your solution team?
Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
The healthcare sector lacks cultural competency and the tools to get there, often failing to understand and meet the diverse needs of its stakeholders. These failures stem from mis- and low understanding of human identity, leading to disparities in care, workplace dissatisfaction, and reduced health outcomes.
Everyone is affected by how identity is categorised and acknowledged in decision-making. A one-size-fits-all approach has led to devastating health outcomes for people outside the “norm”; for example, underdiagnosis of heart attacks in women and hypoxemia in dark-skinned people. Accurately measuring and monitoring health inequities is essential for achieving health equity, but most of the sector fails in this task.
The problematic category of race, still widely used in the healthcare sector, produces misleading information since race is only ever a proxy for other categories including ethnicity, economic status, religion and skin shade. A clinical trial may include 10% self-identified black participants, but still have no dark-skinned representation. As New York City’s chief medical officer Dr Michelle Morse has said, “Health equity scholars have been raising alarm bells about the way race has been misused in clinical algorithms for decades.”
Without cultural competency, healthcare cannot transform from a one-size-fits-all paradigm into an equitable sector.
What is your solution?
Restitution of culture in healthcare is an ethical imperative because the links between biological and cultural diversity are inextricable. It is self-evident that people with differing genders, religions/worldviews, ethnicities, disabilities and long-term conditions, sexualities, cultural and national affiliations etc have differing needs.
An area of research and practice known as precision medicine (PM) is quickly expanding, using big data and AI to tailor disease prevention and treatment to specific patients. Many hope PM will shift the sector from its one-size-fits-all approach to a patient-centred paradigm, but some researchers point to “a real risk that [PM] will exacerbate health inequalities”, and this approach still fails to center culture, focusing instead on genomic, lifestyle and existing conditions information.
Our solution, Diversity Atlas, is a sophisticated, versatile simple-to-use tool that collects and analyses granular data that can reveal the full scope of cultural diversity within a given cohort, including ethnicity, languages, dialects, religion/worldview, national affiliations, gender and other demographic attributes, enabling informed, culturally competent responses, whether in a hospital, community or clinical trial setting.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our solution was designed to serve everyone. We already have several customers in the health sector.
Academic literature over the past two decades has established that culturally competent healthcare improves patient adherence to treatment, reduces medical errors, and leads to better health outcomes.
Our work with hospitals and in the broader carer sector (eg: Carers Victoria, Anglicare, Melbourne City Mission) has revealed a major shared concern: to determine how accurately their staff represent the community they serve. Our platform gives them insights into the linguistic and cultural depth of their teams and relationships to countries (by birth, ancestry or residence) and compares these to external data sources such as patient data and census data, which can be loaded onto the DA dashboard. Demographic markers including gender, sexuality, disability and age are also measured and compared.
These are intersected against customised questions for our customers to probe what aspects of health-provision are the most challenging for their teams. Frequent answers include cultural barriers, linguistic barriers, and complications around interacting with patients and customers who are (for instance) transgendered, or Muslim, or non-English speaking.
DA enables providers to target their resources and respond to needs with intelligence and awareness.