COVID-19 is Accelerating a Specific
Healthcare Disparity

For five years our startup team has been dedicated to expanding mental health care access for underserved communities, where Blacks often experience the greatest healthcare disparities. COVID-19 has shown us how those disparities translate to a disproportionate number of lives lost. The mental health impact of all these losses is incalculable.

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The majority of those suffering from mental illness are not receiving treatment.1
Factors associated with limited access to care, such as living in a rural area, low average income, and lack of insurance, may lead to the underutilization of mental healthcare services.
Emerging data shows that COVID-19 disproportionately affects minority communities, likely due to racism’s downstream effects on socioeconomic opportunities, health outcomes and insurance coverage.2
The Minimizing Error, Maximizing Outcome (MEMO) study found that minority patients often were unable to attend appointments with specialists due to transportation and other challenges.3

Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.

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As a response to the COVID-19 outbreak and limited access to face-to-face care, the Cares Act5 has been a tremendous success in that loosened restrictions and increased reimbursement for telemedicine has allowed for a widespread growth of telehealth. However, higher rates of mental health and the need for preventive care will require telehealth solutions that are integrated with public and private institutions via electronic health records in order to support a continuum of care rather than acute-only. That will also require higher levels of personal data security such as is required in current provider-driven health records systems. Simply having video-conference and/or text/chat capability will likely not survive re-instituted patient-data regulations on telemedicine.