Diversity Bonuses in Health Care: Lessons from Rural Kansas and Ophthalmology
Essay · 2022 · By Zoey Payne, Green Medical Network Group
Complex health problems need more than one kind of expertise. Two GMNG projects show what happens when physicians, policy leaders, educators and technologists work on the same problem.
Social scientist Scott Page argues that on complex tasks, teams of diverse thinkers outperform teams of similar ones. He calls the advantage a "diversity bonus." Medicine is a natural fit: no single clinician can master every domain a hard problem touches, and the outside help a team needs is usually different knowledge, not more of the same.
The bonus doesn't appear just by putting different people in a room. Teams need a shared mission, members who feel included, and people who can translate across disciplines. That is the model Green Medical Network Group was built around.
Case 1: Home-growing providers in Southwest Kansas
Southwest Kansas has long struggled to keep health providers. With no four-year university in the region, students leave for training and rarely return. Working from its first office in Dodge City, GMNG brought together local leaders, including the late Senator Bud Estes, with physicians, health-care executives and policy experts.
The group realized it was missing one domain: education. Bringing in colleges and Wichita State University's Physician Assistant program reframed the goal as training mid-level providers in the community itself, with room to add nursing, physical therapy and social work programs over time.
"I am because we are." — Ubuntu, a Southern African philosophy
Case 2: AI in ophthalmology with Bascom Palmer
In 2018, GMNG partnered with Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami to explore AI research in eye care. The network's ophthalmologists and machine-learning advisors helped shape the early foundation of the venture, which later grew into a Series A-funded company.
The project also showed AI's limits. Algorithms need high-quality data, can carry bias forward, and often reach privileged patients first. Getting it right takes ethicists and legal advisors alongside clinicians and engineers.
What we take from both
Both projects worked because no single discipline owned the problem. In Kansas, the breakthrough came from adding educators to a table of clinicians and policymakers; at Bascom Palmer, it came from pairing physicians with engineers and then bringing in ethicists to keep the technology fair. For rural and underserved communities, where the problems are tangled and resources are thin, building that kind of mixed team on purpose is how GMNG intends to keep working.
Diversity Bonuses in Health Care. Green Medical Network Group, 2022.