Healthcare’s Digital Accessibility Problem

The push for digital accessibility aims to ensure equal access and inclusion for all individuals. So why are healthcare companies failing to keep up?

In this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted, we sit down with Plum Ertz, Director of Engineering at Ro, to dissect healthcare’s digital accessibility problem. Following explosive growth in telemedicine due to consumer behavior changes brought on by the pandemic, the healthcare industry has struggled to provide accessible healthcare services on the Internet, regardless of the technology or disability someone may have. Plum sheds light on the work being done at Ro to address these challenges, emphasizing the simple steps that teams can take to enhance their digital accessibility.

Plum also shares stories from her time at Buzzfeed, where she accidentally took down the entire site after forgetting a semicolon and once mistakenly calling a midterm election 5 hours too early.

Episode Highlights

• (1:35) Defining accessibility
• (6:20) Why accessibility matters
• (9:50) An explosion in the number of telemedicine users
• (12:19) How Ro defines success
• (16:05) Screwup stories
• (18:15) Stories from Plum's time at Buzzfeed
• (22:50) Getting started with accessibility at your company

Episode Excerpt

Conor Bronsdon: Welcome back to Dev Interrupted. We are live in New York, and we've got Plum Ertz with us. Plum, welcome to the show.

Plum Ertz: Howdy. Thank you so much for having me today.

Conor Bronsdon: Anyone who comes on the show with sparkly red heels is absolutely a hit in my book, this Casual Tuesday shoe. I like it. And you're the director of Software Entering at Ro, which is a direct telemedicine startup. Would love to dive in on a topic I know you're very passionate about, which is accessibility, and I know it's for the work you're doing here.

Plum Ertz: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. There are so many different ways to define accessibility. When you think of healthcare and telemedicine, I'm based in New Jersey and New York, whatever you wanna say, and I can find a doctor. There are a million doctors and a million specialists. For a lot of folks, you don't have that opportunity. Even in the United States, it's not a choice of, oh, do I go online or do I go to a doctor? It's, do I get healthcare or not? So putting healthcare on the internet, how do we make that happen?

And it's not just enough to put healthcare on the internet, and that's where digital accessibility comes in. Just because something is online, on a website, doesn't mean you can access it because you really have to build it in a way where folks, regardless of what technology they're using, what network they're using, what ability or disability they may have, they're able to use that.

And that's not the responsibility of the person to try to figure out the Konami code to use your website. That's the responsibility of the people building these sites, building these experiences to make it accessible, and sometimes that really gets lost in the build, especially weirdly enough in healthcare.

I don't know. Have you ever gone on your insurance website or any digital websites? Exactly, yes. Probably had some of the less good experiences in those spaces because so much attention is just brought to the functions of getting the insurance and the form fields and everything, and not enough on just making it usable.