Refugee Health Information Infrastructures

Developing health information infrastructures with community health workers

Community Health Workers (CHW’s) in Kentucky help acclimate newly arrived refugees to the US healthcare infrastructure and ensure that their healthcare needs are taken care of. In doing this work CHW’s are involved in translating healthcare information, helping refugees with their transportation needs, building the health literacy of the refugee families and of others in their community and offering other services that are not always specified in the job description. The current workflow requires CHW’s to enter information about the services they provide into the system once they reach their office, which could be a few hours or days after they have offered the service. The CHW’s I have spoken with have expressed interest in having access to a mobile application they can use to enter such information into the system. Having an accurate account of the different services offered and time spent on them will not only help the CHW’s manage their work better but can also help them present their work to relevant stakeholders and request additional funding or policy changes. The goal in this project is to use participatory design-based research methods to design a mobile application that the CHW’s can use to account for the services they offer in the field.

Publications

Peer, Firaz. (preparing for DIS). Prototyping Health: Experimental Civics in Refugee Resettlement Contexts. Manuscript Being Prepared for the Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 2026. 

Peer, Firaz. "Resettlement work: Accounting for the invisible work of refugee community health workers"