Healthcare Innovators Collaborative Event Recap: Driving Change, Advancing Equity for All*

Key takeaways:

• Collaboration is needed to make forward progress in advancing health equity.
• Life sciences organizations are a critical partner to help inform and support health equity from clinical trial diversity to real-world use of therapies for all populations.
• PINC AI^™ Applied Sciences’ Healthcare Innovators Collaborative brings health systems and life sciences organizations together to support collective efforts to advance health equity.

The Problem

In the U.S., it is well documented that people of color and other groups that are underserved experience higher rates of illness and death across a wide range of health conditions. Research has shown that health inequities can be costly, resulting in premature deaths, causing additional economic and social losses, as well as excess medical care costs and lost productivity each year.

Working to solve or remove unjust disparities will require healthcare and community organizations working together. Viewing health equity through a business lens can help eliminate inequities and potentially reduce the total cost of care.

What PAS is Doing

On May 4, the PINC AI^™

Applied Sciences’ (PAS) Healthcare Innovators Collaborative (HIC) hosted a Health Equity Executive Exchange to discuss tackling the problem and advance health equity. Topics included identifying barriers impeding care, identifying and prioritizing community needs, exploring the data needed to drive action and working collaboratively to build health and economic wellness in communities across the nation.

With guidance from Dr. David Nash, Founding Dean Emeritus and Dr. Raymond C. and Doris N. Grandon Professor of Health at the Jefferson College of Population Health, Dr. Omar Lateef, CEO RUSH University System for Health (RUSH), Dr. Larry McEvoy, the author of Epidemic Leadership: How to Lead Infectiously in the Era of Big Problems and Dr. Tracey Rouse Hoke, Chief Quality Officer, Patient Safety and Performance, University of Virginia Health, participants explored the challenges facing clinicians, patients, hospitals and health systems.

Participants at the Health Equity Executive Exchange reaffirmed the importance of working to help eliminate inequities and improve the health and economic wellness of our communities.

Learning from Others: How RUSH is Advancing Health Equity

RUSH led by Dr. Omar Lateef, has been working to advance health equity long before the 2016 – 2019 Community Health Needs Assessment

(CHNA) illuminated deep-seated structural health inequities.

During the HIC event, Dr. Lateef shared that RUSH believes that “actions speak louder than words” and its success resulted from connecting and listening to the community to understand the people’s needs and identify existing problems. What they found was people wanted access to education, unions and college funds, not a single request was for medical care such as blood pressure checks or medications.

This meant the team would need to look at advancing health equity through a different lens. As a result, RUSH founded an anchor network of the hospital's 13,000 employees and began looking at how RUSH could promote economic vitality. RUSH’s first initiative was offering community youth who had graduated from high school an opportunity to work with a large software company to obtain a certification as a software trainer that could lead to a position that paid up to fifty dollars per hour.

In addition, they decided to invest in the community through providing small business loans, utilizing local vendors, creating jobs by working with its suppliers to encourage relocation to Chicago and reinvesting capital back into the neighborhood.

Based upon their early success, they decided to expand their efforts beyond RUSH. In 2018, RUSH was joined by five other health systems — AMITA (now Ascension) Health, Cook County Health, Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, Sinai Chicago and University of Illinois Health — to establish West Side United (WSU), a racial-equity collaborative aligning investments in economic development, education, healthcare and building the environment to benefit Chicago’s 500,000 West Side residents. WSU aims to address inequities in health and life expectancy and, in 2017, set an overarching goal of decreasing the gap in life expectancy between the West Side and downtown area by 50 percent by 2030 — a gap that is up to 14 years in some communities.¹ Dr. Lateef emphasized that we can’t solve the death gap unless we are truly in this together, including corporate America.

Is it scalable?

Dr. Lateef, believes these efforts to create accessible, affordable, high-quality, equitable health for everybody are scalable. In his professional opinion, the work requires collaboration to pool resources, crowdsource funding and maintain reinvestment in communities.

In addition to learning about RUSH’s efforts, participants were encouraged by Dr. Larry McEvoy to consider the design of a value-based epidemic using the Affirmation and Appreciation, Curiosity and Compassion and Empathy (A.C.E.) tool to help accelerate the uptake and diffusion of equity in health. This new operating system defines leadership in a wildly participatory, infectious and permeating way. In this new way of leading, uptake and diffusion becomes a shared social authorship of shifting patterns of action, thought and interaction. He turns to lessons from biology and how many things like viruses (also cancer and coral reefs) operate this way. He says this kind of epidemic leadership takes an idea and three organizing principles (conditions + interaction + multipliers) to create a positive pathogen.

Dr. McEvoy also shared tips on how to scale health equity efforts exponentially, or what he calls a positive epidemic that could create health everywhere, now and in the future. Dr. McEvoy spoke about lessons learned from biology, complexity science and network science that provide a different way to think about the way we lead, organize and adapt. This is precisely what WSU is doing in Chicago, they are working towards creating a more inclusive, positive and healthier world through collaboration.

While all their work helps drive improved health in communities, WSU’s successful programs aren’t only rooted in healthcare-related efforts. They are working to evaluate the impact of their communal efforts through their measurement framework and metrics that matter to the community with hopes of creating scalable blueprints for other health systems. The learnings from these evaluations can guide efforts aimed at helping eliminate structural inequities built into society.²

Hope for the Future

Advancing health equity isn’t going to be easy. The PAS HIC is committed to collaborating with partners to generate real-world insights and co-innovate new solutions that help eliminate inequities impacting communities. They continue to focus on understanding the diverse needs of populations across the nation and creating opportunities for organizations to work together to advance health equity.

“Leaders from Premier and the Jefferson College of Population Health shared an exciting and fruitful day together, working toward creating a more equitable and just healthcare system,” said Dr. David Nash, the Founding Dean of TJU’s College of Population Health. “It will take a different kind of leadership, and action-oriented research and scholarship to measurably reduce disparities in healthcare and in the outcome of that care. We are on an important journey together and we look forward to the challenge ahead.”

PAS along with partners will continue to advance research and develop technology-enabled tools to help health systems better prepare and improve their processes for managing and treating patient populations who experience inequities. As hospitals, health systems and life sciences organizations, we are vested in our communities to help ensure access to care for all.

*PINC AI^™ Applied Sciences’ Healthcare Innovators Collaborative hosted the Health Equity Executive Exchange on May 4, 2023. Participants heard about health equity efforts from RUSH University System for Health, TJU’s College of Population Health, Dr. Larry McEvoy the author of Epidemic Leadership: How to Lead Infectiously in the Era of Big Problems and University of Virginia Health.

For more on this topic:

• Read the Advancing Health Equity Roadmap paper that outlines how the PINC AI™ Applied Sciences team is working to advance health equity through collaboration and innovation.
• Learn more about the PINC AI^™ Health Equity Collaborative and opportunities to apply for a fully-funded, two-year membership award.
• Read more about PINC AI^™ Applied Sciences and explore our research and analytics solutions.

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