There is no such thing as high-quality, safe care that is inequitable, and structural racism and other forms of discrimination contribute to poor quality care and suboptimal health outcomes for patients from historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups.
Inequity is not inevitable, however, and one proven path to safer and more equitable care is to gather and stratify data on patient-harm events by race, ethnicity and other key socioeconomic factors in order to make health inequities visible and create the opportunity to correct them.
This is not a subject for esoteric debates, but a process that has been shown to be effective in real-world situations, as has been captured in the “Advancing Equity through Quality and Safety Peer Network Series,” an AMA Ed Hub™ Health Equity Education Center resource that offers 11.75 CME credits in all.
AMA Ed Hub is an online learning platform that brings together high-quality CME, maintenance of certification, and educational content from trusted sources all in one place—with automated credit tracking and reporting for some states and specialty boards.
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This first-of-its-kind online curriculum provides comprehensive instruction for integrating equity into quality and safety practices.
“We can't fix what we don't see,” said Emily Cleveland Manchanda, MD, MPH, director of social justice education and implementation at the AMA Center for Health Equity. “By stratifying data, you can see the problems that you then need to fix.”
Among the health systems that participated in the AMA Peer Network are Atlantic Health System, Ochsner Health and University of Iowa Health Care. Each is a member of the AMA Health System Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
The curriculum has five focus areas, three of which are below.
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“Integrating Equity Into Harm Event Reporting.”
- The modules in this set, which offers 2.5 CME credits, describes how equity can be advanced using quality- and safety-reporting tools, and details strategies for incorporating equitable practices into existing harm-event reporting processes.
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“Equipping Staff With Knowledge, Skills and Tools to Create Safe Spaces.”
- This set of modules, which offers 2.25 CME credits, defines key terms and concepts related to equity and health care and aims to facilitate conversations between physicians, other health professionals and staff to talk about inequities and the way they are manifested in the quality and safety of care.
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“Collect and Use Harm Event Data Segmented by Sociodemographic Characteristics.”
- This set of modules, which offers 3.25 CME credits, discusses technical aspects of how to stratify data by sociodemographic characteristics and then also how to address the inequities the data reveals and prevent them from recurring.
- Learn more about how demographic data can identify health inequities.
Network alumni continue to work
“Each of the health systems have made significant progress, building on the momentum catalyzed by their participation. They are sharing successes with us and remain engaged with one another as part of the Quality, Safety, Equity network,” said Tam Duong, director of health systems transformation at the AMA.
“Based on their successes, the things that we've learned from their engagement in this space, and the changing regulatory landscape, we know that there is a lot of demand and need for strategies and tools, such as those covered in these modules, to support health systems in engaging in this important work,” Duong added.
