HEAL

National Minority Health Month can be a launchpad to closing the ‘knowing-doing’ gap.

Attendees of the upcoming Accelerating Health Equity Conference, May 10-12 in Cleveland, will have an excellent opportunity to see the Health Equity Roadmap come to life as they join counterparts in other health care and community organizations for hands-on learning that can bolster efforts to advance diversity, equity and inclusion.

We spoke with Leon D. Caldwell, AHA’s senior director for health equity strategies and innovation and one of the Health Equity Roadmap’s architects, about its importance to hospitals and health systems.

Across health systems, equity, diversity and inclusion may require varying degrees of resources based on a hospital’s leadership, staff resources, geography and demographics. Here are recommendations to engage the hospitals in your system.

Providing culturally and linguistically appropriate services is key to advancing health equity, improving patient safety and quality of care and eliminating health disparities. This literature overview provides a series of resources intended to guide and empower efforts to reach this critical milepost.

Now is the time to evaluate how far we have come in closing gaps in health disparities, assess where health care is on the equity journey and take what we’ve learned to strengthen our organizations and communities through collaborative and innovative work — by investing in our neighborhoods and one another.

Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of the Health Equity Roadmap — an innovative framework to support hospitals and health systems in their efforts to become more equitable organizations and dismantle structural barriers to health and overall well-being.

Creating infrastructure to maintain accountability to sustain DEI work across departments and service lines.

Advancing health equity and fostering healthy communities by investing in strong hospital-community partnerships.

Creating pathways that lead to diversifying leadership ranks to reflect the populations and communities served.

Using quantitative and qualitative data to inform, design, and evaluate improvement strategies.

Applying a DEI lens to organizational policies and supporting an equitable and inclusive climate and culture.

Practicing cultural humility and activities that improve culturally appropriate care such as language access and health literacy.

This glossary refers to the Associated Press (AP) style for a majority of the terms listed below. For terms not specifically included in the AP Style guide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Boston Public Health Commission, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Washington School of Public Health informed those definitions.

AHA’s Institute for Diversity & Health Equity designed the Health Equity Roadmap as a framework to guide hospitals and health care systems to advance equity.

Research and experience show that leading health equity strategies cut across these six major areas within health care organizational structures: Equitable and Inclusive Organizational Policies; Community Collaboration for Solutions; Diverse Representation in Leadership and Governance; Collection and Use of Data to Drive Action; Culturally Appropriate Patient Care; and Systemic and Shared Accountability.

In 2018, the Alliance formed a Racial Equity Network (REN) of local and state systems and program leaders and advocates to inspire more engagement about best practices, data collection, and action steps at the systems level.

This report aims to strengthen community-driven efforts to achieve health equity by improving the online data tools that make health equity data readily available to them.

The purpose of this tool is to ensure equity* by creating a lens through which each Healthy King County Coalition Workgroup better understands who is impacted by our policies and practices.

Action report on local consortia in two regions delineating pragmatic steps to ensure effective, sustainable cross-sector partnerships.

This video explores the story of collaboration between MultiCare and their community partners to reduce breast cancer disparities in Tacoma, WA.

The Complex Care Startup Toolkit is a practical collection of guides, templates and other tools for new and developing complex care programs, regardless of setting, population or geography.

Designed for community-based organizations and health care organizations already engaged in partnership, the Partnership Assessment Tool for Health, or PATH, provides a format to understand progress toward benchmarks characteristic of effective partnerships, identify areas for further development and guide strategic conversation.

This resource provides a step-by-step process for organizing and preparing, planning and prioritizing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating, and sustaining a primary care and public health partnership project.

This report provides a framework to facilitate collaborative working relationships between the public health and health care sectors. The framework includes tactics and actionable strategies to support several elements of collaboration: governance structure, financing plan, cross-sector prevention models, data-sharing strategy, and performance measurement and evaluation.