The workshop will be held before the Society for Behavioral Medicine’s 39th Annual Meeting on Monday, April 9 and Tuesday, April 10, 2018 in New Orleans, Louisiana. Participants will be drawn from academia, industry, and government. During the 1.5 day workshop, participants will consider how social science and technology can combine to create inclusive sociotechnical systems that can benefit everyone, including those groups that experience health disparities. General themes and questions for the workshop include:  

Theory to Design and Implementation: Sociotechnical interventions that reduce health disparities require interdisciplinary knowledge because health disparities are rooted in social, behavioral, economic and healthcare-based factors. This workshop will strengthen collaborative research by exploring, “How do researchers appropriately identify and map theory to design, implementation, and evaluation?”

Sociotechnical System Blackboxes: As research in interactive systems in healthcare has matured, computing and health informatics researchers have increasingly drawn upon social and behavioral science theories [2] to design, develop, and analyze sociotechnical systems. We ask: “How researchers can understand when sociotechnical systems elicit positive, negative or neutral health outcomes for disparity populations, can we identify why? How do we identify the individual or combined impacts of theory and design?”

Sociotechnical Systems to Inform Theory: Behavioral medicine researchers have traditionally developed health behavior theories and models through participant self-report or by utilizing commodity systems to evaluate the theory at scale. Thus, this workshop provides mutually beneficial opportunities for researchers to discuss the design of personalized, contextual sociotechnical systems that can triangulate and verify data that informs models. In this line of thought, we examine, “How do the data that sociotechnical systems collect impact theory? How do we negotiate the dosing of sociotechnical systems from what is clinically needed to what people are willing to use? “

Multidimensional Evaluation to Reduce Health Disparities at the Population Level: Sociotechnical interventions hold promise for reducing disparities and improving the health of marginalized populations, however interventions can generate unintended consequences that exacerbate disparities. To prevent this, we will consider optimal methods for engaging health disparity populations at all stages of intervention design, implementation, and evaluation. We will also consider safeguards at each level and checking mechanisms as the intervention is deployed at scale.  

The four themes provide ample space for cross-cutting challenges to emerge in human computer interaction, complex systems, security, privacy, smart cities, and sustainability.

All participants are asked to create a one page document that addresses:

• A promising sociotechnical intervention they deployed;
• The audience and context in which the intervention was deployed;
• How health disparities were considered and addressed (or why they were not addressed);
• Based on the intervention deployment and outcomes, open research challenges.