AHA participates in CMS forum on advancing health equity

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Office of Minority Health today opened a two-day virtual forum on advancing health equity and efforts to address structural racism in health care.

Today’s presenters included Joy Lewis, AHA senior vice president for health equity strategies and executive director for the AHA Institute for Diversity and Health Equity, who described how hospitals and health systems can collect, stratify and use patient demographic data to address disparate outcomes and drive better care. This includes standardized data collection on Race, Ethnicity and Language (REaL); sexual orientation and gender identity; and social determinants of health (SDoH).

For more information, see the AHA’s recent toolkit on data-driven care delivery, the first in a four-part IFDHE toolkit series that will focus on accelerating progress to achieve health equity.