DiversityRx

The Target

Understanding the cultural and linguistic concerns that serve to insulate and often isolate diverse members of society is central to the focus of DiversityRx and its Many partners to provide services for impacted groups. These groups include minority members of society, immigrants, and indigenous communities. In its mission to serve this group, DiversityRx has embraced partnerships with a wide spectrum of health care providers, policy makers, researchers, and other public and private entities. These committed providers strive to address the disparity created in both accessing and thus ultimately receiving health care comparable to other segments of the population. With its strong focus on promoting education, DiversityRx's role, in addition to providing information to its partners that can be used to effect changes that will ultimately result in the identified group accessing needed health care, is one of support. This has been the mission of DiversityRx since 1997.

Tools

To address the objective of providing information, DiversityRx and its partners have elected to utilize the forum that speaks loudest toDay—technology. Much of their information sharing utilizes virtual learning events in the form of Webinars and miniconferences, and the provision of resource databases, by which distance issues and other institutional obstacles are tackled. The objective is to identify topical issues and, through these and other media, to give members access to relevant information and facts that will guide their actions. The [Page 400]learning has been described as bottom-up peer learning, by which each member and participant contributes to the education of the others via the open medium provided by the constructed network mechanism. A big part of the success hinges on participation and the learning and problem solving that is accessible and anticipated through the “virtual” learning approach. No limit or boundaries are set on the collaborations because the open nature of the forum fosters current information as well as unfolding problem solving. The plan is to continue to implement peer-learning networks. This approach has received favorable reviews from member organizations and individuals. With more community involvement and a more direct approach to raising and sharing issues and the responses to these issues, the vision is that more interaction will result in a wider dissemination of appropriate information, techniques, and best practices, which will ultimately filter down to the population at the heart of this project.

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