Currently submitted to: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Feb 17, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 4, 2026 - Apr 29, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A Human-Centered Approach to Address “Last Mile” Barriers to Healthcare Access: Co-designing mobile clinics for underserved populations
ABSTRACT
Background:
In the United States, many individuals lack adequate access to healthcare services due to a host of economic, logistical, and social barriers. Telehealth technologies and mobile health clinics present the opportunity to close the “last mile” between patients and healthcare services.
Objective:
Our multidisciplinary team from healthcare and academia wanted to design a mobile health clinic with potential telehealth services, along with the supporting infrastructure as a first step towards developing such a program for our region.
Methods:
Our multidisciplinary team hosted a co-design session to collaboratively design and mock-up mobile health clinic services aimed at serving the needs of our community, with an emphasis on vulnerable populations within our region.
Results:
This session yielded insights into the necessity for flexible space, equipment, and staff, and how “high-tech” tools, like drones and robots, along with a fleet of small, medium, and large mobile health clinics, could be maximally positioned to traverse “the last mile” and provide equitable healthcare to our community.
Conclusions:
The use of mobile clinics to address last-mile challenges could have a transformative impact on community health, and co-design is a valuable tool to elucidate pragmatic opportunities to target first, and can aid in developing a broader roadmap to scale up strategically and sustainably.
Citation
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