Digital Health for All

Digital health has accelerated in recent years, with breakthroughs in telehealth, remote monitoring, AI-enabled decision support, and interoperability, alongside growing evidence from implementation science. Yet underserved and hard-to-reach populations—including older adults, rural and remote communities, people with disabilities, linguistic minorities, and low-SES groups—continue to face barriers spanning connectivity, device access, accessibility, digital literacy, trust, and culturally safe design.

Measurement gaps, misaligned incentives, and uneven policy and market structures further limit equitable uptake and impact. To generate actionable evidence and frameworks that design, evaluate, finance, and implement equitable digital health solutions across diverse underserved populations, ensuring measurable, sustainable, and trustworthy impact.

Themes for Articles include (but are not limited to):

- Lived experiences and qualitative insights from underserved groups (older adults, rural/remote, disability, Indigenous, migrants, linguistic minorities, low-SES, justice-involved).
- Cultural, linguistic, and community determinants of trust, safety, and engagement in digital health.
- Infrastructure and access: broadband, device availability, accessibility and usability (e.g., WCAG), offline-first and low-bandwidth design.
- Digital and health literacy, caregiver support, and training models that enable sustained adoption.
- Inclusive, participatory co-design, intersectionality-aware methods, and community governance.
- Equity-centered metrics and evaluation frameworks; context-aware, longitudinal, and mixed-methods assessment.
- Algorithmic fairness, representative datasets, and bias mitigation in AI-enabled digital health tools.
- Implementation science approaches for adaptation, integration into workflows, scaling, and sustainability.
- Business models, reimbursement, and financing mechanisms (e.g., value-based care, subsidies, social entrepreneurship) that align incentives with equity.
- Policy and regulatory levers: interoperability, privacy/data governance, reimbursement parity, safety and quality standards.
- Hybrid care models and community delivery channels (community health workers, libraries, pharmacies, telehealth hubs).
- Comparative case studies and economic evaluations demonstrating real-world impact across settings and populations.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Equity, Digital Access, Equitable Digital Health, Inclusivity, Underserved Populations

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.