Most teams ship “good” products that quietly fail because they never tested them with the people they were supposedly built for. This Techquity Awards special is a four-part episode on how to fix that. I’m joined by Janna Guinen, Executive Director of the HLTH Foundation, plus three Techquity Award winners—Reza Sanai of PicassoMD; Colby Takeda of Pear Suite; and David and Robert Bosnack of Attune Media Labs—who use Techquity as a practical blueprint for building products that actually work in the real world.

Techquity, as Janna defines it, is innovating with everybody in mind—from how you validate the problem to who can realistically use your product on the other side. The HLTH Techquity Awards are case-study based, not feel-good trophies. 
Applicants document how they involved the communities they serve, which population they’re designing for, and which metrics prove they’re closing gaps for both patients and the teams who care for them. 

This year’s winners show three different ways to put Techquity into practice: PicassoMD’s curbside specialist consults at the point of primary care, Pear Suite’s tech and billing rails for community health workers and local organizations, and Attune Media Labs’ AI emotional intelligence companion for burned-out clinicians.

Episode Highlights:

• Techquity Awards use a rigorous case-study process that forces teams to show their problem validation, design choices, and metrics—not just outcomes slides.
• PicassoMD tested its curbside consult platform head-to-head in an affluent urban clinic and a rural clinic with many uninsured patients, proving the model can work in very different settings.
• Pear Suite onboarded more than 600 community health workers and doulas across 80+ organizations serving Medi-Cal members, closing 80% of identified social needs gaps.​
• Attune Media Labs deployed an AI-based emotional intelligence companion with over 1,000 clinicians in rural Cameroon, where about 65% reported burnout, and designed against benchmarks for retention and engagement.

Janna makes the case that Techquity should be the default lens for digital health because inclusive design improves ROI, stickiness, and long-term system sustainability.

And we close with Janna’s announcement that the Techquity Awards are moving from ViVE to the main HLTH event, with applications opening in early spring so these case studies get a bigger stage.

Watch the full HLTH Techquity Awards Special on YouTube to learn how Techquity turns “health equity” from a buzzword into a build process. 

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