WIHI: How Health Care Can Accelerate Health Equity

Date: September 15, 2016

Featuring:

• Ronald Wyatt, MD, MHA, Patient Safety Officer and Medical Director, Office of Quality and Patient Safety, The Joint Commission
• Kedar Mate, MD, Chief Innovation and Education Officer, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
• Anurag Gupta, MPhil, JD, Founder and CEO, Be More America
• Abigail Ortiz, MSW, MPH, Director of Community Health Programs, Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center
• Alex Anderson, Research Associate; Co-Chair, Diversity and Inclusion Council, IHI

What might be possible if health care organizations across the US made a commitment to work to achieve health equity in their communities in dramatically new ways? This is something IHI, in collaboration with partners who've been wrestling with health inequities for years, have been looking into in search of fresh solutions. The results of this exploration are captured in a new IHI White Paper and make up the discussion featured on the September 15 WIHI: How Health Care Can Accelerate Health Equity.

 

So, how might your health care system or hospital or clinic build on work you’re already doing or take things in a new direction? Our guests offer suggestions and lay them out as part of a new framework that includes making health equity a strategic priority at the highest levels and throughout your organization. A good starting point can be conducting a comprehensive health equity self-assessment. In addition to sharing an overview of the framework, we focused on steps your organization can take to reduce implicit or “unconscious” bias among providers and staff. Unexamined and implicit bias at the point of care because of someone’s race, gender, ethnicity, economic status, disability, and more can undermine the best efforts to reduce treatment and outcome disparities. It’s not easy to surface and talk about these issues, but it’s crucial.