Joe Grzywacz

Associate Dean of Research, College of Health and Human Sciences, San Jose State University

Joseph G. Grzywacz, Ph.D. is Associate Dean for Research & Faculty at San José State University — the only public university in Silicon Valley, where three-quarters of students are non-white and more than a third are first-generation college students. That institutional identity shapes everything about Health TechQuity, the cross-sector initiative he leads.

Health TechQuity operates from a straightforward premise: digital health innovation built without centering equity will reproduce and amplify existing health disparities. The populations experiencing the greatest disparities are disproportionately covered by Medicare and Medicaid — making equity-centered design not a moral luxury but a market imperative.

At Health TechQuity’s first conference, a session on ambient scribes surfaces what no single-sector event could: an innovator’s product had documented accuracy failures across languages and dialects, and safety-net providers couldn’t deploy any ambient scribe on the market because no reimbursement mechanism existed for their systems. The problem was named clearly. The solution didn’t come from that room.

That’s exactly why Health TechQuity is still looking for partners.