Webinar Wednesday - Access to Digital Health: Equity by the numbers

Digital health was primarily created to address health care access barriers. However, it can potentially magnify existing access inequalities wrought by the social determinants of health. With the COVID-19 pandemic, access to and utilization of digital health services have skyrocketed in Canada, going from 10-15% in 2019 to more than 60% in April 2022 to finally plateaued around 30%. Who are benefiting from this consumer adoption gain brought about by the pandemic? How are access to and use of digital health services distributed across different population sub-groups in Canada? Did the increase in virtual care services help to mitigate the access disparities during the pandemic?

In this session, I will address these questions by exploring the inequalities in the access to digitally enabled health services across several socio-demographic, socio-economic and health-related factors. These factors include gender, age, race and ethnicity, household income, access to a family doctor, health status, etc. I will rely on equity indicators collected and generated from Canada Health Infoway’s annual survey on citizens, the Canadian Digital Health Survey.

Presented by: 

Waldo Beauséjour is a quantitative economist with a passion for telling great stories with data. He is a senior analyst at Canada Health Infoway where he has been working for over three years. During this period, he has led several projects and analyses including the digital health equity analysis, the 2023 Canadian Digital Health Survey, and Canadians’ Health Care Experiences during COVID-19 Survey.

Waldo has extensive experience in conducting impact evaluations aiming at assessing the effects of government-funded initiatives on health outcomes. He holds a master’s degree in applied economics and has a solid background in statistics and econometrics.

Earn One Continuing Education Unit (CEU) for attending this webinar. Content from the webinar aligns with Core Health Informatics Topics: The Canadian Healthcare System, Information Technology, Analysis and Evaluation