Putting Health Equity in Action for Your Business
November 7, 2024 · Guest Contributor
By Joneigh Khaldun, MD, MPH, FACEP, Vice President and Chief Health Equity Officer, CVS Health
Health equity, defined by the CDC as the ability for every person to have “a fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health,” is a top priority for many health care organizations. Advancing health equity is no longer viewed only as a moral obligation, but as a fundamental business imperative that contributes to cost savings, competitiveness and workforce productivity. To drive impact and return on investment, health equity strategy must be integrated within the broader operations and business goals of an organization.
Here are four ways health care organizations can integrate health equity as a foundation for doing business.
1. Build Shared Health Equity Understanding
Every organization understands health inequities differently, as well as their root causes and effective interventions to address them. The first order of business should be to establish standard definitions of health equity terminology, which will create a common language for inclusive conversations and reduce the risk of misinterpretation. Then we can examine the root causes of health inequities. Building a foundation of knowledge across organizations will increase stakeholders’ confidence and skills to apply tools and techniques to embed health equity strategy within their work and to implement organizational health equity goals.
Educational opportunities offer space for collective learning and self-reflection at the individual, team and organization levels. Create training that builds a shared understanding of health equity—from multi-day, intensive programs to asynchronous, self-paced courses—with additional specialized, clinician-focused trainings that offer continuing education credit for internal teams and external provider networks.
2. Engage Leaders to Champion Health Equity
Limited understanding of health equity with regard to foundational and business growth, combined with competing priorities, can hinder organizations’ commitment to health equity strategies. Establishing clear connections between health equity investments and operational goals is critical to engage leaders to champion this work.
A supportive CEO and senior leadership team can legitimize health equity as an organization’s core tenet and financial driver. But leaders—health equity leaders—must be set up for success in order to be effective. They need a protected operational budget, people, resources and effective governance structures that ensure accountability. Health equity leaders should participate in business, operational and board of director meetings, establish deep relationships with colleagues across lines of business and work with organizational leaders to drive integration of aligned strategies.
3. Leverage Quality Improvement for Health Equity
A QI framework supports the critical shift from viewing health equity as supplemental and siloed to being a core component of an organization. Ongoing, systematic QI processes achieve measurable progress through indicators of health care quality, which includes equity. In addition to training cross-functional teams on best practices, creating a QI tool based on health equity standards from industry experts (NCQA’s Health Equity Accreditation Plus, for example) can provide a structured process to strategically embed health equity within existing goal setting, strategic planning and budgeting processes.
Given that advancing health equity requires continuous, long-term commitment and investment, it is important to recognize early and intermediate goals and objectives. A standardized QI tool guides business units in selecting metrics that align with value drivers such as growing revenue, reducing costs and increasing operational efficiency. Leveraging QI for health equity encourages a growth mindset of celebrating accomplishments, learning from setbacks and having the flexibility to adjust goals as needs evolve and milestones are reached.
4. Enhance Health Equity Data Expertise
Information on health-related social needs and demographic data (e.g., race, ethnicity, preferred language, geography, age, gender identity, sexual orientation) used to detect health inequities among specific populations is often incomplete, which can impede organizational health equity efforts. In addition to building trust with consumers to encourage self-reporting of these data, organizations can utilize public sources (e.g., American Community Survey) and digital tools (e.g., mobile apps) to overcome systematic gaps in data completeness, accuracy and granularity.
Data democratization—providing colleagues and community stakeholders with tools and resources to understand and access data—is important for enhancing organizational health equity data expertise. To encourage integration of health equity strategy into analytical processes, organizations must streamline data access and standardization procedures; provide clear instructions for appropriate utilization and interpretation of data; and design storytelling templates to communicate stratified analyses in digestible, visually compelling formats.
A commitment to health equity requires sustained effort and strategic partnerships with internal and external stakeholders. It’s imperative for organizations committed to improving health outcomes and decreasing disparities to have leaders who work intentionally and nimbly to achieve results.
This blog is brought to you by CVS Health and the views expressed are solely those of the sponsor.
