Design Implications for Health Technology to Support LGBTQ+ Community - a literature review.

Despite being overlooked by technology designers, digital sources and online channels are still the most popular places for LGBTQ+ people to seek health information after medical professionals, due to fears of discrimination and stigma [5, 4, 6]. Most designs still only ask individuals to identify as one of the binary sex classifications, male or female, and assume heterosexuality, instantly eliminating the appropriate options for over 10 million people in the United States alone who do not fit into those constraints [4]. This creates a void of information for and about LGBTQ+ communities. However, due to the lack of a more robust LGBTQ+ identification system, computer scientists and designers continue to ignore a crucial LGBTQ+ demographic. It also creates inaccuracies in health information technologies and their resulting data sets, which fuels disparity and discrimination. This paper contributes to the health service research community a set of design implications for integrating medically relevant categories for health information technology to support the collection and use of LGBTQ+ identity related information like current sex, sex at birth, gender identity, sexual orientation, preferred name and pronouns and illicit more constructive data collection than the current standard binary male/female sex identifiers.