HEAL

AHA members have expressed interest in understanding the degree of alignment between the AHA’s Health Equity Roadmap and CMS's three new quality measures, as well as the alignment among regulatory policies. The crosswalk identifies how each framework aligns with eight overarching key practices that are linked to advancing health equity in hospitals.

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.

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.

This report surveyed members of the National Association for Health Services Executives on their experiences working in health care, organizational priorities and strategies around DE&I, and opportunities in career advancement. The report recognized the need for policy change at the internal level as well as the federal and state policy level. Internally, connecting with communities and creating a strong internal strucutre were imperative.

The Health Equity Roadmap: A national initiative to improve health care outcomes, health equity, diversity and inclusion, and end health inequities.

Diversity, inclusion, cultural humility and health equity are imperative for health care organizations, as the U.S. demographic landscape continues to change and regulatory agencies continue to implement requirements to improve safety and quality, reduce health care disparities and create more affordable care for patients. This certificate program works to train leaders who can build a more robust diversity strategy in their health care community.

This toolkit provides checklists to assess the organization's diversity (inclusing leadership), workforce diversity, and patient care while providing action steps to move toward being a more diverse organization. The toolkit also provides case studies of various hospitals who took initatives toward becoming more diverse and their outcomes.