{"id":7463,"date":"2026-03-02T12:39:23","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T12:39:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/?p=7463"},"modified":"2026-04-05T00:54:56","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T00:54:56","slug":"100-years-of-black-history-reclaiming-digital-health-as-architects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/africanamericanvoice.net\/?p=7463","title":{"rendered":"100 Years of Black History: Reclaiming Digital Health as Architects"},"content":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Hassanatu Blake<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

This Black History Month, we celebrate 100 years of recognizing Black legacy \u2014 Black builders, leaders and innovators who imagined and crafted futures they knew were possible. Their brilliance engineered solutions, healed communities and set policies that saved lives. Today, as digital health and artificial intelligence rapidly reshape our communities, we must ask ourselves what our ancestors would do in this critical moment and answer with action.\u00a0We must become architects of our digital future.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our Reality<\/strong><\/p>\n

If we go by the numbers, the story is stark. In the United States,\u00a029% of Black households lack broadband access<\/a>, and\u00a0less than half of 1% of venture capital funding reaches Black health technology founders<\/a>. Black stakeholders are nearly absent from product development, implementation and regulation. The consequences of this exclusion are deadly. In 2019, researchers publishing in Science\u00a0exposed a widely used hospital algorithm that was less likely to refer Black patients for high-risk care, even when they were equally sick as white patients<\/a>. Researchers have also revealed\u00a0AI triage tools systematically underidentified Black patients\u2019 severity<\/a>, and\u00a0image recognition systems designed to diagnose skin cancer performed significantly worse on darker skin, missing melanoma in Black patients at alarming rates<\/a>.<\/p>\n