Today’s announcement by Deloitte regarding its launch of “Illustrate Change,” an initiative to drive greater diversity in medical imagery among individuals in historically underrepresented and marginalized populations, received a very warm welcome from global health equity proponents.
The program is a collaboration between Deloitte and prominent Nigerian medical illustrator Chidiebere Ibe. Johnson & Johnson also helped enable the library with funding from its “Our Race to Health Equity” initiative. Illustrate Change is aiming to become the largest library of diverse medical illustrations to address the range of health inequities that continue to flow from medical imagery’s lack of representation.
Health equity advocates have long underscored the materially implicit bias that exists without medical imagery representation and the extent to which awareness will increase with respect to how conditions present on diverse skin tones. This, in turn, has very significant implications for health outcomes, particularly with less than 5% of medical images currently showing dark skin.
Additional information about this initiative can be found here.
