A world post Covid-19 will be different forever.

Changes: Less face-to-face, things are moving virtual, people and teams have more time to create.

Impact:Off-the-shelf sales stalled, focus on Hygiene, more demand for content creation

We are: Producing more content, Building 2D capability, focusing on Hygiene

Equality and bias is now more important than ever, with COVID it is actually killing people. It’s not just a nice to have, it’s a need to have.

Majority black counties have three times the rate of infections and nearly six times the rate of deaths as majority white counties, according to the analysis.

“Why is it three or four times more so for the black community as opposed to other people?” President Trump asked at Tuesday’s White House task force briefing. “It doesn’t make sense, and I don’t like it, and we are going to have statistics over the next probably two to three days.”

“Health disparities have always existed for the African American community, but here again with the crisis now — it’s shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is,” Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

We don’t have access to care and if we do it’s likely that care is of worst quality because they are often termed minority-serving,” Blackstock said. “And they may not have a specialist or the resources needed to care for covid-19 patients. And there’s implicit bias on the part of the health-care providers, and the studies have shown that there’s bias toward white patients over patients of color.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/04/10/4-reasons-coronavirus-is-hitting-black-communities-so-hard/

Approval for testing for COVID-19 is particularly vulnerable to implicit biases, doctors say.

“the whole process more vulnerable to the implicit biases that every patient and medical professional carry around with them.” (https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nidhiprakash/coronavirus-tests-covid-19-black)

Result:

California has now enacted mandatory unconscious bias training for medical professionals, and other states are expected to follow suit. We have had Stanford’s Associate Dean at the Medical School reaching out to us to co-create and pilot training.

Future Direction for Equal Reality

We are seeing more and more interest for what we do in the healthcare sector - specifically focused on care and bias in patient/clinician interactions. Eg. GSK, want to focus building a VR experience teaching Diversity in clinical trails, Johns Hopkins wants to look at professional standards of care for Nurses, and a lot more healthcare providers are asking us for simulation on end-of-life discussions and difficult news (such as Alzheimers Australia and many more). This all leverages our technology focus perfectly. We see this trend continuing for the future.