Abstract
Background:
The HealthPartners organization is a health plan and a health system comprised of several hospitals and clinics in the Twin Cities area. Equitable care has long been a priority of the organization, but most work has been done through individual departments, training programs, or individual entities within the larger organization. In 2015, leadership from Regions Hospital, a HealthPartners hospital, participated in the Disparities Leadership Program. Their work focused on creating an equitable care infrastructure at the hospital, with a goal of reducing healthcare disparities. As a result, the Regions Equitable Care Committee was formed. This committee meets monthly to continue work on identifying and reducing disparities. Members of this group also participate in the health system’s larger group, the Equitable Care Sponsors Group. NI V provided the perfect opportunity to create an equitable care educational strategy that aligned with the equitable care work of these committees.
Methods:
To align GME with HealthPartners’ equitable care priorities, we partnered with leadership from the Regions Hospital Equitable Care Committee and the HealthPartners Equitable Care Sponsors Group, using their 4 main strategy areas to guide our work: (1) reduce disparities with information and best clinical practices; (2) support language preferences; (3) partnerships and engagement; and (4) knowledge, cultural humility, diversity, and inclusion.
Results:
The Regions Hospital Equitable Care Video describes the Regions Hospital patient population and HealthPartners’ equitable care priorities. The video will be shown at new resident orientation and potentially at all other trainee orientations. The HealthPartners Institute Equitable Care Graduate Education Toolkit is a website of equitable care resources for educators. The toolkit is grouped by the HealthPartners Equitable Care priority areas and is organized in a manner that guides the user’s progression through each strategy area.
Conclusion:
Both the Equitable Care Video and Toolkit will help give our residents and program directors a solid foundation in understanding healthcare disparities and in how to identify and reduce them. Future work involves identifying resident champions to lead from within their programs and working with the health system to further their community engagement priorities.
PROJECT MANAGEMENT PLAN – Equitable Care Educational Strategy.
| Vision Statement | Residents are champions of change in reducing healthcare disparities. |
| Team Objectives | Our objective was to improve health and reduce healthcare disparities by aligning GME with HealthPartners’ equitable care and community engagement priorities through development of an institutional equitable care educational strategy and incorporation of residents into the equitable care work of HealthPartners and Regions Hospital. |
| Success Factors | The most successful part of our work was a deliverable that was truly aligned with our hospital’s priorities and that will lay a solid foundation for our continued equitable care work. We were inspired by the interest throughout the larger health system in this project. Many are seeing uses for our Toolkit in their areas. |
| Barriers | The largest barrier encountered was the increased interest by the health system that resulted in changes to our project scope and the content of our video. The content veered a little from the original intent of the residents to meet the organization’s goals. We worked to overcome this challenge by finding other ways to incorporate the residents’ perspective in the Toolkit. |
| Lessons Learned | The single most important piece of advice to provide another team embarking on a similar initiative is to take the time you need to do it right. The time we took to build connections across our organization and to learn about what the organization is working on makes us hopeful that this effort will be sustained. |