This app can link trans patients to safe health care providers

Oct 8, 2021

This article is published in collaboration with Futurity.

A person is using their phone whilst sitting outside, reflecting the accessibility of the TranZap for all users. Image: Robin Worrall/Unsplash

Modesta Alobawone

Our Impact

What's the World Economic Forum doing to accelerate action on Health and Healthcare Systems?

The Big Picture

Explore and monitor how LGBTI Inclusion is affecting economies, industries and global issues

A hand holding a looking glass by a lake

Crowdsource Innovation

Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:

LGBTI Inclusion

A new app called TranZap has been developed to build a better connection between trans patients and their health care providers.
Trans patients will be able to review their experiences and recommended health care professionals to other people.
There is still a substantial amount of stigma attached to trans patients in practices, so the hope is that this app can reduce this.

A new app called TranZap aims to connect trans people with gender-affirming health care providers.

The TranZap, the first of its kind in the area of health care technology, will collate shared experiences, either good or bad, of health care providers that trans people have visited. Other trans patients will rate and review these experiences, building a platform to provide the necessary information to make better-informed decisions about whom to see for medical needs.

There will also be a referral program where health care providers can refer their patients to provide feedback on their service on the app.

Have you read?

The app is set to beta launch in October.

“As a transgender person myself, it has been daunting navigating the health care system with many providers who still need to be educated on the basic medical needs of trans individuals,” says app co-creator Taylor Chiang, a second-year medical student at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

“This can make it difficult and stressful for many trans patients, and I hope that this app will help provide the needed resources to help direct people to the right gender-affirming HCP.”

Discover

How is the World Economic Forum bringing data-driven healthcare to life?

The application of “precision medicine” to save and improve lives relies on good-quality, easily-accessible data on everything from our DNA to lifestyle and environmental factors. The opposite to a one-size-fits-all healthcare system, it has vast, untapped potential to transform the treatment and prediction of rare diseases—and disease in general.

But there is no global governance framework for such data and no common data portal. This is a problem that contributes to the premature deaths of hundreds of millions of rare-disease patients worldwide.

The World Economic Forum’s Breaking Barriers to Health Data Governance initiative is focused on creating, testing and growing a framework to support effective and responsible access – across borders – to sensitive health data for the treatment and diagnosis of rare diseases.

The data will be shared via a “federated data system”: a decentralized approach that allows different institutions to access each other’s data without that data ever leaving the organization it originated from. This is done via an application programming interface and strikes a balance between simply pooling data (posing security concerns) and limiting access completely.

The project is a collaboration between entities in the UK (Genomics England), Australia (Australian Genomics Health Alliance), Canada (Genomics4RD), and the US (Intermountain Healthcare).

According to a recent survey report published by the Center for American Progress, 62% of transgender people said they worried about being judged because of their sexual orientation or gender identity when seeking health care.

The COVID-19 pandemic worsened some health care disparities that already existed. Although the Biden administration reversed the previous government’s federal law to discriminate against individuals based on gender identity or sexual orientation, discrimination among these patients in the health care system is still widespread.

Collaborators on the project include Rutgers, the PROUD Gender Center of New Jersey, other transgender outreach groups, and co-founder Eli Lucherini of Princeton University.

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.