Postdoctoral Fellow Georgia Tech, Georgia, United States
Introduction: Health disparities are defined as preventable health differences among historically marginalized groups. There are a myriad of problems creating health disparities: economic factors, healthcare access, environmental factors, education, and poor quality of care. Engineering, which has always played a key role in the healthcare system, presents a solution to address health disparities by training engineers to understand health disparities and create engineering solutions to approach them. In biomedical engineering (BME), students learn how to apply engineering principles and methods to problems in the healthcare system. Therefore, to create a biomedical engineering workforce ready to solve modern-day problems, concepts of health disparities should be incorporated in undergraduate curricula.
The existing literature on health disparities in curricula predominantly focuses on disciplines such as public health, biology, medicine, and pharmacy. Recently, scholars have begun to show how health disparities have been integrated within undergraduate biomedical engineering education. Additionally, there has been a recent update in ABET standards requiring departments to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion in biomedical engineering curriculum, creating a push to address topics related to equity such as health disparities. Therefore, there is a need to explore the extent to which health disparities concepts are incorporated in BME undergraduate programs.
To assess the current landscape, a scoping review was conducted. The two research questions framing this study are: 1) How are health disparities integrated into BME undergraduate programs, as evidenced in the literature? 2) What are the gaps regarding research on the inclusion of health disparities in biomedical engineering curricula?
Materials and
Methods: To address the research questions, a scoping review of literature was conducted. The purpose of a scoping review is to synthesize existing literature on a topic and identify key characteristics and gaps in the field, in hopes of informing future research direction. Three databases were searched: Engineering Village, Education Research Complete from EBSCOhost and ERIC from EBSCOhost. These databases were chosen with the intention of finding papers in engineering and education. The following search string was used for these databases: (((("biomedical engineering" OR "bioengineering") WN ALL) AND (("health equity" OR "health disparities" or "healthcare disparities" or "health inequities") WN ALL)) AND (("education" OR "curriculum" OR "class" OR "course") WN ALL))
In addition, handsearching was conducted in Google Scholar, American Society of Engineering Education PEER repository, and three journals: Journal of Engineering Education, Biomedical Engineering Education and Annals in Biomedical Engineering. Select keywords used previously for the databases were used for handsearching.
To further screen the papers found from the initial search, the following criteria were used: 1) Does the research focus on an undergraduate course? 2) Was the course in biomedical engineering/bioengineering? 3) Was health disparities at least one of the main topics incorporated into the course? These criteria were chosen to center research that examined biomedical engineering undergraduate courses. From the criteria, only eight papers passed screening. four of which were conference papers, three of which were journal articles and the remaining being a student report from an open access institutional repository.
Results, Conclusions, and Discussions: This study found that incorporation of health disparities in biomedical engineering curriculum often happens in a single course as opposed to courses throughout the academic program. Only one paper focused on the incorporation of health disparities throughout the entire four-year curriculum. For the seven papers that covered a single course, these courses occurred at varying stages of the curriculum such as the middle years or last year. Additionally, there were a variety of ways health disparities concepts were incorporated in the curriculum. Some studies introduced health disparities as additional modules in a course whereas some studies incorporated topics throughout the entire semester. However, how topics were incorporated throughout the semester was rarely the focus of these papers, which can make it difficult for interested departments and faculty to update their own curricula. This can be attributed to the motivations of papers assessing students' knowledge of topics as opposed to how students were taught health disparities topics. Lastly, three papers highlighted cross-disciplinary courses that integrated biomedical engineering students with peers from other disciplines, such as other engineering disciplines, life sciences, and social sciences, suggesting there are diverse approaches to enhancing students' understanding of health disparities.
In conclusion, the scoping review found that while the research is limited, biomedical engineering departments and faculty have begun to incorporate health disparities into undergraduate curriculum and assess their students' knowledge of health disparities. However, curricular change has occurred mainly in a single course as opposed to throughout the entire curriculum. These findings suggest the need for a larger examination of how health disparities are incorporated into curricula at more institutions, especially from institutions of varying types (i.e., MSI, HBCU, emerging research institution, teaching focused). Overall, this review contributes to understanding how health disparities are incorporated in biomedical engineering courses, which can help provide departments with guidance on curriculum development.
Acknowledgements (Optional): I would like to thank Dr. Kelly J. Cross and the Cross Inclusive Excellence in Engineering Lab at Georgia Tech.
