Bridging the Digital Divide: Strategic Interventions for Health Equity
Corewell Health · Strategy & Operations Intern · May 2024 – Jul 2024 · Grand Rapids, MI
Morehead-Cain Civic Collaboration — 5-person scholar team, 8-week engagement
The Challenge
Corewell Health's telehealth and digital health tools had strong adoption overall — but those numbers masked a critical equity gap. Vulnerable populations in Grand Rapids were systematically underutilizing these tools, leading to higher ED visits, longer hospital stays, and worse chronic disease management.
What I Did
Reframing the problem
Through stakeholder conversations — including with the West Michigan President and frontline community health workers — we learned the barrier wasn't access to technology. Most community members had smartphones. The barrier was health literacy: the ability to find, understand, and actually use health information. This shifted our approach from 'give people more tools' to 'meet people where they are and teach them what they already have.'
Ecosystem mapping
I helped scan 6 key touchpoints in the Corewell ecosystem — from virtual urgent care to school health initiatives to community ministries — to find where digital health literacy was falling through the cracks. We used national health literacy data to focus on the communities most affected.
Designing the Corewell Academy
We co-designed a three-pronged intervention: community health fairs at trusted neighborhood locations with hands-on patient portal setup and workshops; a virtual health resource tab; and online seminars for nutrition and lifestyle education. I contributed to budget modeling, partnership strategy (6 initial partners), and the evaluation framework.
Population health KPIs
I defined dual-track metrics: institutional (ER utilization, revisit rate, length of stay, virtual appointment frequency) and community-reported (confidence with health tech, literacy scores, chronic condition management). The key was correlating digital engagement with clinical outcomes.
Portfolio Artifacts
Impact
What I Learned
"I went in thinking this was a technology problem. It's not. It's a trust problem, an education problem, and a systems design problem. Technology is just one lever — and it only works when you pull the others first."