Equitable Access to Healthcare Technologies: A Human Factors Perspective

Abstract

The rapid expansion of AI-enabled and digital healthcare technologies has transformed clinical decision-making, service delivery, and patient experience. Yet these innovations continue to intersect with social, structural, and organizational inequalities that restrict access for marginalized populations. This commentary examines equitable access to healthcare technologies through a human factors lens, arguing that equity cannot be achieved through technological availability alone. Instead, equitable access emerges from deliberate attention to the physical, cognitive, social, and organizational dimensions of human–technology interaction that shape how individuals perceive, interpret, and use digital systems. Drawing on frameworks of distributive justice, ecosocial theory, biopower, and fundamental cause theory, the paper situates inequities in broader sociotechnical systems while identifying how design choices, workflow structures, and interface features can either mitigate or amplify disparities. The analysis highlights how misalignments between human capabilities and technological demands undermine trust, usability, and safety, particularly for communities already facing entrenched barriers. By connecting ethical commitments to human-centered and user-centered design practices, the paper articulates a pathway for integrating justice-oriented principles into the development and governance of emerging technologies. This inquiry underscores the need for participatory design, continuous evaluation, and reflexive innovation to ensure that digital transformation advances, rather than undermines, equitable healthcare access. KEYWORDS: human factors, health equity, AI in healthcare, digital health, user-centered design, sociotechnical systems, health disparities, ethical technology design, healthcare access, health administration JEL Codes: I14, I18, O33, D63, H51