Designing Health Technologies for Immigrant Communities: Exploring Healthcare Providers' Communication Strategies with Patients

2025-04-25

International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

AI Summary

This study addresses the lack of clear mechanisms for effective communication between healthcare providers and culturally diverse immigrant patients in high-income countries—a gap that hinders the design of culturally appropriate health technologies. Through semi-structured interviews with 15 healthcare practitioners serving immigrant communities, the research systematically identifies four key cultural competence strategies: recognition, community engagement, incremental care, and adaptive communication. Building on these insights, the work proposes a contextualized and actionable design framework for health technologies tailored to immigrant populations. This framework offers human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers and practitioners principled guidance and practical implications for developing culturally sensitive digital health tools that meaningfully support cross-cultural care delivery.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Intelligent User Interfaces
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web applications in cross-disciplinary domains and verticals such as mixed reality, smart cities, and digital health
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

Patient-provider communication is an important aspect of successful healthcare, as it can directly lead to positive health outcomes. Previous studies examined factors that facilitate communication between healthcare providers and patients in socially marginalized communities, especially developing countries, and applied identified factors to technology development. However, there is limited understanding of how providers work with patients from immigrant populations in a developed country. By conducting semi-structured interviews with 15 providers working with patients from an immigrant community with unique cultural characteristics, we identified providers’ effective communication strategies, including acknowledgment, community involvement, gradual care, and adaptive communication practices (i.e., adjusting the communication style). Based on our findings, we highlight cultural competence and discuss design implications for technologies to support health communication in immigrant communities. Our suggestions propose approaches for HCI researchers to identify practical, contextualized cultural competence for their health technology design.

Problem

• immigrant communities
• patient-provider communication
• cultural competence
• health technologies
• healthcare communication

Innovation

• cultural competence
• immigrant health
• patient-provider communication
• health technology design
• adaptive communication