Mission

Creating digital health innovations that improve lives. Together.

Vision

The Brown-Lifespan Center for Digital Health (CDH) is a hub where creative minds across diverse disciplines and perspectives can create and implement impactful digital health. CDH is a model of how an academic medical center can influence health by uniting technology, science, entrepreneurs, healthcare, and health systems. We drive a rapid pipeline from discovery to dissemination through our deep commitment to methodological rigor, equity and ethics. Building on our direct connections with our patients, communities, and practitioners, our research is informed by both current and future clinical needs. We collaboratively design, test, and deploy digital health projects that address society’s most pressing health challenges. We anticipate and help shape the future of the field.  We impact health through digital innovation - together.

Values

Impact: We pursue projects that make a real difference for real people. We are dedicated to ensuring that digital health is effective, usable, and feasible - and to making sure that digital health products that meet these metrics are shared widely.

Innovation: The best digital health interventions push the edge. They redefine how we think about health outcomes, how and where technology can influence health, and what new combinations of digital technology and healthcare may be possible. We believe that the most transformative innovations emerge from partnerships of unusual suspects; new connections between diverse disciplines, academic institutions, and private and public organizations are key to our long-term success. 

Equity: Our work is deeply rooted in our communities - our patients, our clinicians, community partners, researchers, and students. Through careful inclusion of voices that have traditionally been underrepresented in the science and design of healthcare interventions, we can focus our work on addressing and preventing social inequities in health. We commit to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the deepest sense of the words. This focus on equity is too often missing from the world of digital health. 

Integrity: In recognition of our responsibilities to our patients and colleagues, we ensure that our work is rigorous, using best-of-class methods for development, measurement, and dissemination. Our work must also be ethical. We respect our responsibilities to patients, participants, and providers; are attentive to conflict of interest; and maintain a purposeful eye toward issues of stigma, transparency, and justice.

Diversity Equity and Inclusion at the Center for Digital Health means that we…

• Value diversity in our workplace by embracing the full range of intersecting identities and lived experiences our internal team members and wider community members bring to the table. Uplift and support the full participation and leadership of individuals and groups who have been and continue to be marginalized in healthcare and research.

• Learn about inequities that exist in our community as a part of our research curriculum and Center culture.

• Practice reflexivity by striving to understand how the power we hold in our individual identities and our positions as researchers biases the work we do.

• Take accountability for growing and helping each other grow. Collaborate to create a workplace community in which we are all ready and willing to hold each other accountable, and to be held accountable by others.

• Foster a DEI-centered collaborative culture by actively seeking out partners who demonstrate a commitment to addressing and preventing health inequities and ensuring that we interact with partners in ways that embody our own core values - partnership building is a two way street. 

• Resituate objectivity by recognizing that all knowledge is situated, accepting that science and technology inherently includes the biases of the humans involved, and considering the ways in which research, both historical and current, is often a site of exploitation and harm. We commit to these understandings informing our work.

• Refute singular expertise in the realms of DEI knowledge and practice. It’s not that we know nothing, but rather that we are not singularly right about everything and must commit to continued learning.

• Understand DEI as a continuous practice of action embedded into every step and aspect of our work.