Ivelyse Andino, a Bronx-born daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, was working in biotech when her mother was diagnosed with leukemia in 2009. As someone who worked in the health and wellness space, she thought she understood the various inequities that plague the healthcare industry — as well as how to overcome them.
But it wasn’t until she and her family were managing her mother’s treatment that she truly understood just how deep-seated discrimination can be.
“We did everything right — we spoke English, we enunciated, we did everything that we were told or thought to do, and still [it wasn’t] enough,” Andino says. At the simplest levels, access seemed out of reach. “I never met my mom's attending physician, never looked at his eyes, never met him face to face.”
The dings kept coming. When Andino’s mother needed a bone marrow transplant — a procedure that has a 79% match rate for white patients but just 48% for Hispanic or Latino patients, according to national marrow donor program Be the Match — the family was hopeful when a match was made, but devastated when a lab error rendered the marrow unusable. Later, during chemotherapy, Andino’s mother was treated with the wrong medication.
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For Andino, and for so many other BIPOC patients, taking stock of these errors can be hard to absorb and process: Was this a microaggression? Was this simply unintentional human error? Is this negligence? Is this discrimination?
“To be a Black or brown woman, to be poor, to be from the Bronx in these spaces, it feels like you're just taking punches nonstop,” Andino says. “And sometimes you can't even see those punches, you just feel them. That’s what it's like to experience healthcare today.”
After eight months, Andino’s mother lost her fight against cancer. In the wake of her death, Andino started to think of ways she could
“Healthcare really isn't fair — and it's not designed to be,” Andino says. “I got into health tech really early, and to be the only person of color [at my company] really led me to say, if I'm already building innovative and cutting edge technology that we're all using today, what would happen if I did that with purpose, with intention, for my community and with my community?”
A 2020 study from the National Library of Medicine showed that between 2005 and 2016, medical professionals were 10% less likely to admit Black patients to the hospital than white patients, leading to an increased death rate. One in 10 Asian Americans say that they feel that they would receive better healthcare if they were of a different race or ethnicity, compared to only 1% of white Americans, according to a recent report by Virgin Pulse.
Additionally, many marginalized communities face language barriers — 40% of mainly Spanish-speaking Hispanic and Latino people report communication problems with their physicians, compared to only 26% of the same population who speak primarily English, according to the Virgin Pulse report.
“Over 90 million adults don't understand basic health information,” Andino says. “It's lonely and it's scary. So we might not ask questions, we might not feel empowered to have an opinion or disagree.”
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Radical Health connects communities in an online open forum where they can
Carla Tenorio, district family advocate with the New York City Department of Education and daughter of Panamanian immigrants, also has horror stories of basic healthcare being denied to loved ones. When her Panamanian mother’s water broke during her pregnancy with Tenorio, for example, she was taken to Mount Sinai in New York City, where, after being examined by doctors, was told there wasn’t a room available.
Andino’s community initiatives led her to partner with Tenorio under a New York City grant program, and the women are now working together to build a workshop on social and emotional work as well as mindfulness. It’s all in an effort to focus on minority groups’ mental health, another aspect of healthcare that is exclusionary to BIPOC communities.
“We were raised not to cry,” Tenorio says. “We have to change that. We have to let our Spanish community members know that they're not alone. They’re not the
For Tenorio, platforms like Radical Health provide
“What it comes down to is financial support and the politics that come with all this bullshit, but I have all the hope that it is going to change one family at a time,” she says. “One school at a time, and one community at a time.”
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Over 3,000 people are currently part of Radical Health’s network, including hospital systems and public health departments, in addition to
Already, Andino is seeing the on-the-ground impact this kind of information can create. Recently, an older Black woman turned to Radical Health when her primary care physician failed to diagnose persistent symptoms she was experiencing. Through Andino’s platform, she connected with another user who had gone through the same experience and the same symptoms — and was ultimately diagnosed with Lupus. When the woman saw a new physician and was armed with this new information, she got the care she needed — and received the same diagnosis for the autoimmune disease.
“I connected with her the week later and she says ‘I have so much to tell you — I have Lupus,’” Andino says. “I said, ‘I’m so sorry’ and she said, ‘No, I have been struggling for years with these symptoms and no one's been able to diagnose me. Not only do I have answers and feel like I was heard, I now have a friend who's helping me.’”
Radical Health is not a Band-Aid solution for the decades of
“When we think about the future of healthcare, we have to acknowledge the past,” she says. “All of the improvements, like Radical Health, really won't make a difference if we're not reimagining something new.”
