Health Equity Blogs

Three hospitals and health systems are recognized for earning 2020 Carolyn Boone Lewis Equity of Care Awards.

During National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month in July, the AHA and its Institute for Diversity and Health Equity (IFDHE) developed several new resources to aid hospitals and health systems in reaching out to communities that lack adequate access to mental and behavioral health care.

Right before the COVID-19 outbreak occurred, AHA’s Institute for Diversity and Health Equity (IFDHE) convened more than 65 leaders, trustees and clinicians from rural hospitals across the country at AHA’s annual Rural Conference. We inquired about strategies for health equity in rural communities, as well as these communities’ most common areas of disparity or need.

July is National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month. In this conversation, Lisa Hinton, Senior Health Equity and Value specialist with the AHA’s Institute for Diversity and Health Equity, speaks with a faith-based organization leader and two health care experts on ways they are broadening their health system’s approaches to improving community access to mental and behavioral health services in the Greater Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.

In this Spotlight Feature interview, Jean Ricci Goodman, M.D., and Aparna Sharma, M.D., discuss the program’s development and how it’s designed to improve maternal and child health in Loyola’s surrounding communities.

COVID-19 has disproportionately affected communities of color throughout the nation, with minorities more likely to be infected and severely impacted by the virus. But its effect is more than physical.

By Elisa Arespacochaga and&nbs

Kimberlydawn Wisdom, M.D., M.S., IFDHE Board Chairperson, Senior Vice President, Community Health & Equity and Chief Wellness & Diversity Officer,Henry Ford Health System, Detroit answers questions regarding innovative solutions for delivering mental and behavioral health care services

Raymond Waller, hospital administrator at Ascension Brighton Center for Recovery in Brighton, Mich., and 2020 chair of AHA's Behavioral Health Council, looks at substance use rates, stigma and the lack of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) behavioral health care providers. Read more in this guest blog about the work hospitals and health systems can do now to help future generations.

The American Hospital Association’s Institute for Diversity and Health Equity has developed new REaL data resources and tools to help health care providers address health care disparities in the fight against COVID-19 and beyond.

In this conversation, Elisa Arespacochaga, vice president of the AHA’s Physician Alliance and interim executive lead for the AHA’s Institute for Diversity an Health Equity, talks with two health system chief diversity officers about their efforts to learn more about the patients they are serving through REAL data collection, stratification and utilization.

In this AHA Stat Blog, former AHA Board Chair John Bluford says we need action now to improve health equity. “A good place to start is by our health care systems attacking social and economic determinants of health and racism ZIP code by ZIP code, community by community and city by city in pursuit of better communities and a better nation,” writes Bluford.

As we mark July as Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, Harsh Trivedi, M.D., president and CEO of Sheppard Pratt Health System based in Baltimore, Md., and a member of the AHA Board of Trustees, writes that hospitals and health systems must improve behavioral health care access for Black, Indigenous and people of color.

Listen in as Maria Hernandez, Ph.D., president and chief operating officer of Impact4Health, and Karma Bass, senior principal at Via Healthcare Consulting, discuss the health equity challenges that board members can expect to encounter and how best to tackle them.

Eight minutes and forty-six seconds. A lot goes through your mind when you stand or kneel in silence for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. You think about justice and injustice. About despair and struggle.

This Pride Month, the LGBTQ community and its allies celebrate with an aching absence — amid shifting cultural and social tides. Larry Kramer, a literary giant and iconoclast who used words printed and spoken as the engines for his long career, died late last month at the age of 84.

Any way you cut it, this has been a very tough few weeks in our country. We have witnessed a colorful tapestry of Americans voicing loud opposition to the systemic injustices and institutional racism. We’re also seeing centuries’ worth of wounds being opened and spilling into our streets — and tragically into our emergency departments — here in the greater Kansas City metro and in cities of every size coast-to-coast.

The AHA is working hard to achieve health equity by working with the government to improve data collection to guide policy, and by creating tools and resources to help hospitals and health systems improve health equity in the community.

Hospitals and health systems continue to provide care for our most vulnerable communities by addressing social needs, educating on COVID-19 risks and collaborating with community organizations to expand these efforts beyond their walls, writes Elisa Arespacochaga, vice president of AHA’s Physician Alliance and interim executive lead of AHA’s Institute for Diversity and Health Equity. This AHA blog shares new AHA resources addressing the social determinants of health and meeting the needs of vulnerable populations during the pandemic.

In this podcast, Darren Henson, AHA’s director at the Institute for Diversity & Health Equity, explores how despite the COVID-19 outbreak, Loyola University Medical Center – serving the Chicago