SBIR Phase I: A Mobile Learning System to Reduce Unconscious Bias Among Healthcare Providers

This SBIR Phase I project will develop a mobile technology that can train healthcare professionals in science-based skills to break the habit of unconscious bias. Unconscious biases result from learned sets of mostly false and negative associations between a trait and a social group, i.e. stereotypes, that distort how people perceive, reason, and make decisions about other people. In healthcare, these biases often begin a chain of discriminatory interactions that lead to misdiagnoses, increased hospitalization, and unnecessary repeat visits that sustain health disparities and cause tremendous suffering to millions of Americans. Furthermore, these disparities cost the American economy multibillion dollars annually. This project aims to address both these challenges through a scalable mobile technology that will create learning experiences for providers to adopt skills that break the habit of unconscious bias. The project will further NSF's mission by advancing health, prosperity, and welfare of all Americans so they can receive the highest quality of care untainted by unconscious bias. The project's success would contribute to creating a healthier and productive American population, workforce, and economy. A successful outcome of this effort could spur its extension to other sectors, including education, law enforcement, and business. The intellectual merit of this project lies in demonstrating that the company's proprietary methodology enables healthcare providers to develop greater self-awareness about their unconscious biases and thus reduce health disparities. The project will create novel employment of technological, discursive, and experiential learning using a mobile application that offers and incentivizes the practice of bias breaking tools to fully and sustainably break the habit of unconscious bias. The mobile platform will be intentionally designed with the end user's experience and interactions in mind to incentivize them every day to learn and practice activities that transform unconscious biases in themselves. The goal in Phase I is threefold: to determine user preferences in design and experience for adopting new skills and building new habits; develop a high-fidelity beta-test for a limited number of experiences that teach breaking bias skills over a mobile platform; and test its usability and desirability with a representative number of healthcare providers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.