At Infermedica, we recognise the growing importance of gender identity when serving diverse populations.
Our products rely on biological sex as this has been - and continues to be- the dominant paradigm of evidence-based epidemiology that we use to curate our Medical Knowledge Base.
Our products currently rely on biological sex (sex at birth) as an input. This is a mandatory input for all interviews as risk factors, symptoms, and the prevalence of conditions all depend heavily on this in evidence-based medicine.
Nevertheless, some actions were taken to minimize the potential impact on users:
- In English, questions asked in the first person are gender neutral*;
- API implementations open the possibility of filters so that you can add your own logic/experience.
API clients can also take some additional steps to make their experience even more inclusive to all gender identities, like:
- Implementing an additional question to capture gender identity. If this does not match the biological sex, a short message could be displayed explaining that some questions may still reference the user’s sex at birth, in order to provide more accurate triage results and conditions;
- Providing an explanation of why biological sex is used;
- Filtering out potentially sensitive questions**;
- Selecting appropriate risk factors to display.
* Some languages (not English) use gender-specific grammatical forms. This is the case for Polish, Slovak, Czech, Romanian, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Arabic languages. In these cases, development of gender neutral questions would be a must.
** Please note that applying filtering to risk factors or questions may adversely impact the performance of the product as it then is no longer a validated use case.
MCh, OKr