UC Davis Health

Ashish Atreja

UC Davis has a long history of providing care to underserved communities across Northern California. We have developed innovative approaches to reduce health disparities and deliver high-quality care,including some of the earliest telemedicine networks in 1992, designed to bring academic excellence to remote rural hospitals and their patients. Our ongoing digital health transformation is building on this history and foundation of innovation with the same purpose: use technology to increase access and improve equity in healthcare.

Digital Equity: Leaving no one behind

Digital health creates an exciting opportunity for us to be more collaborative and more inclusive in our care delivery – in ways that make access to care easier for patients. We are embarking on a digital transformation at UC Davis Health with a goal of leaving no patient, no clinician, no researcher, no student, and no educator behind.

Digital equity is commonly defined as making sure everyone has the technology capacity to fully participate in society, democracy and the economy. Our goal is to make sure that healthcare is equally a part of this digital equity equation.

Serving as a global collaboration hub

The newly launched UC Davis Health Innovation hub (Digital CoLab) functions as the front door for the internal and external innovations and global collaborations that will put health into the digital equity equation. DigitalCoLab provides the structure needed for industry, startups, biopharma, other health systems and payers to collaborate with UC Davis Health to achieve these outcomes that are win for patients and a win for partner companies. We are engaging with students, patients, clinicians, and researchers to ensure we have no blind spots, and that multiple viewpoints are considered. When co-designing, co-creating, co-validating and co-transforming digital technologies, our goal is to offer the most user-friendly experience working with UC Davis Health.

Keisuke Nakagawa, MD, Director of Innovation, Digital CoLab, UC Davis Health

Leading with Transparency and efficiency

Transparency for all parties is key to achieving this goal. So often, the most innovative startups and industry partners view health systems as a black box. This creates inefficiencies when the opacity results in too much guess work. By offering clear pathways for partners to engage with UC Davis Health, we are offering a more transparent, predictable roadmap for engagement.

Creating a digital experience and training center for our Staff, Partners, and Communities

Digital health education will play a critical role in realizing our vision of digital health equity. UC Davis Health comprises multiple entities that are nationally ranked, including the UC Davis Medical Center, the UC Davis School of Medicine and the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. These share a common campus alongside the planned Aggie Square public-private research project, with all serving as a digital experience center and training ground for staff, clinicians, industry partners, and the community at large to engage in hands-on learning opportunities around digital health.

Our goal is to leave no one behind in the ongoing digital transformation of healthcare.Through collaboration, transparency, and education, we will continue make UC Davis and the Digital CoLab national leaders in digital medicine and continue our nearly 30-year history of innovation that reduces health disparities and increases access to high-quality care everywhere.