JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Precision health embodies a growing interest in healthcare practice, public health, and medical research that is sensitive to environmental and genomic characteristics that may lead to divergent health outcomes between different groups within a population. Enhancing awareness of diversity has parallels with calls for ‘health democracy’ and greater patient-public participation within healthcare and medical research. That requires considering health as a deliberative space, which occurs often at the banal, or everyday, level. The health inequity experienced by recently arrived migrants in Sweden provides the empirical context by which to understand these issues and their implications for enhancing public health with social consequences.

Methods:

The project will span over three years and will bring together scholar-scientists and students from five different institutions, the pharmaceutical industry, non-profit agencies, and three nations. We are planning through research, workshops and conferences to collaborate with researchers from Brazil and US and establish new relations that could benefit Sweden’s internationalisation of education, research, and outreach. We also aim to establish and identify precision health strategies as well as promote equal access to quality health care, including for such marginalised groups as disadvantaged migrants. Ethics and dissemination: The network activities do not require ethical approval because it will not involve data collection. Results of the interdisciplinary collaboration will be disseminated via a series of international conferences, workshops, and web-based materials. These materials will be produced so as to be accessible to a broad range of disciplines including researchers in the medical and social sciences, as well as health and medical research practitioners, and policy-makers. To ensure the network project advances towards applied research, a major goal of dissemination is to produce tools for applied research, including prototyping an app designed to enhance health accessibility for marginalised communities, such as disadvantaged migrant populations in Sweden.