Black medical professionals launch initiative to bolster health equity
Black Directors Health Equity designs a roadmap for board members to address health disparities
A group of Black executives has launched a playbook designed to help improve healthcare, according to Becker’s Hospital Review.
The Black Directors Health Equity, in partnership with Deloitte Health Care, created the playbook to “Encourage Board Directors to more directly influence conversations regarding health equity,” according to information on the board’s website.
The Centers for Disease Control defines health equity as individuals having a “fair and just opportunity to attain their highest level of health.”
This requires, according to the public health agency, focused efforts that address historical and contemporary injustices, helping society overcome socioeconomic obstacles to health and healthcare and eliminate preventable health disparities.
Still, the CDC reports that Blacks die from diseases at a younger age than whites, and African-Americans are more likely to avoid seeking medical help due to cost.
John Daniels, the chair, president, and founding member of the Agenda, told Becker’s his group focuses on disease identification, increasing talent, and solving barriers to healthcare.
He said his group seeks “to identify certain disease states that affect African Americans more predominantly and to develop actionable efforts to address those things to increase the talent in the pipeline of diverse individuals in the health ecosystem and to drive efforts around solving social determinants of health by looking in a much more unique way that those things happen outside of health systems walls, that can really have a direct impact.”
He told Becker’s the playbook “is a compilation of material that helps people in the boardroom ask the right questions to cause management to divide, develop a much more effective approach around eliminating health inequity.”
The Agenda’s website says the playbook can help board directors by helping them understand how they can impact health equity; understand why it’s essential, from a business perspective, to invest in health equity; and focus on ways boards can engage on the topic.
Daniels believes measuring what works and considering community history can improve health equity.
“Aggregating and having a trusted source of information around what really moves the needle on health equity issues is really very important because there’s a ton of information out there,” he told Becker’s.
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