Over the past decade or so, health systems have been adding new roles to their leadership teams, such as chief innovation officer, chief population health officer and chief wellness officer.
Last month at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas, I spoke with Whitney Haggerson about the significance of her unique role: vice president of health equity and Medicaid at Providence.
“Thinking about a system like ours that spans seven states, we need a focus on Medicaid and on equity. We like to talk about equity as it’s everybody’s job, and caring well for patients on Medicaid is everybody’s job. But until we’ve built the framework to actually enable our clinicians to do that in an easy way, it’s really nobody’s job,” she declared.
Haggerson said that her main focus is making sure that Providence’s more than 120,000 employees are well-equipped to advance health equity, which involves providing quality care for patients on Medicaid.
“That looks like all sorts of things. It looks like being able to stratify our data by payer or by race or ethnicity. It also looks at how we can be alongside our operators and give them best practices. Oftentimes, they are bogged down in the day-to-day operations of our clinics and our hospitals — so being able to partner with them to say, ‘Hey, let us help,’ I think, is huge,” she explained.
For instance, busy clinicians may not have things like screenings for social determinants of health or referrals to community-based organizations at the forefront of their minds. But with a dedicated leadership team focused on health equity, health systems can begin to make sure these types of things are embedded into provider workflows.
Haggerson also mentioned that her team has established a health equity fellowship for its employees.
“This was in response to our executives saying, ‘Folks want to do this work — folks want to care well for patients on Medicaid, and they want to ensure that there’s no inequities in access or outcomes. But they don’t know how — the skillset doesn’t exist.’ So we said, ‘What if we build the capacity to teach people how to do this?’” she remarked.
For the year-long fellowship program, Providence selects 20 staff members interested in advancing health equity. They are chosen regardless of their roles or titles — so far, the program has featured employees such as community health workers, practicing providers and quality directors, Haggerson noted.
The fellows spend about 25% of their time that year learning how to center equity in their day-to-day work, she explained.
The program consists of classroom-style teaching sessions, self-paced modules, and a health equity improvement project. For each project, Providence earmarks funds to give the fellow, as well as pairs them with a performance improvement coach, Haggerson said.
“We have a clinician in our women’s and children’s division who noticed that we had a 17% inequity in BIPOC patients with Medicaid in pediatric immunizations. So she’s taken the framework of the fellowship and the funding that we earmarked for her, and she’s doing a quality improvement project over the course of the next year to reduce that inequity — to cut it in half. The three-year plan is to fully eliminate the inequity,” she stated.
By launching this fellowship program, Providence is working to help staff members at all levels of the organization be active participants in the health system’s mission to improve health equity, Haggerson noted.
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