The Women’s Health Institute (WHI) at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) are partnering with the community-based non-profit organization New Jersey Black Women Physicians Association. Together we are developing an app, called TULiP that aims to improve healthcare equity, particularly for Black residents in New Jersey. One of the struggles that Black residents face is finding a physician whom they trust.

Since 2019, policymakers from more than 50 American municipalities and three states have called to identify racism as a public health crisis. And on September 3, 2020, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) introduced the Anti-Racism in Public Health Act in Congress. Our response to this call is to address the issue of confronting systemic racism in healthcare. Led by Black women physicians, our team is developing a mobile app called “TULiP'' which stands for Technology Uniting Like-minded Physicians and Patients. The goal of TULiP is to address incompatible patient-provider interactions that subsequently result in poorer healthcare outcomes for BIPOC communities. Our objective with TULiP is to improve clinical racial competence and connect residents with racially congruent providers. This app, starting off as a directory of Black physicians based in New Jersey, will expand to consumers and physicians nation-wide contingent on additional funding, research, and development. Our team is currently studying Black patient preferences in regards to physician characteristics. After analyzing these research results, the end-goal of TULiP is to serve as a directory of culturally humble physicians of any race that the Black community can effectively find doctors to support their needs.

TULiP currently has 4 digital assets: An internal Admin Site, Physician Website and Two Patient Mobile applications (iOS and Android). The current Technology stack is built on React and React Native and Node.js and PostgreSQL for the database. We use third party applications for server hosting, and data capture.