AHA Recognizes Hospitals with the Equity of Care Award

Grants & Awards

 

Award honors hospitals for promoting diversity, reducing health disparities.

Henry Ford Health System in Detroit and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, are both winners of the American Hospital Association’s second annual Equity of Care Award. The AHA award recognizes hospitals for their efforts to reduce healthcare disparities and promote diversity within the organization’s leadership and staff.

The award will be presented July 24 at the Health Forum/AHA Leadership Summit in San Francisco. AnMed Health in Anderson, South Carolina, and Rush University Medical Center in Chicago will be recognized as honorees.

This year’s winners have successfully incorporated the use of race, ethnicity, and language preference data to better understand their care processes and seek continual improvements; cultural competency to understand their community and ensure individualized care to all those in need; and diversity measurement to confirm their leadership and board reflect the community they serve.

Winner: Henry Ford Health System

Henry Ford Health System (HFHS) collects demographic data from more than 90 percent of its patients and embeds that data into equity dashboards that are part of the overall quality and service metrics tracked by all business units to spur interventions in areas like diabetes outcomes among African American patients. HFHS uses cultural competency as an ongoing training for employees and clinicians to provide high-quality care. Using Employee Resource Groups, a Healthcare Equity Scholars Program and resident training, HFHS is continually evolving and improving its approach. HFHS also is dedicated to diversity through the use of a candidate pool that reflects set goals for minorities and women. Its efforts have been rewarded with a 57 percent increase in minorities in top leadership levels and a 44 percent increase in females in top leadership levels from 2009 to 2014.

Winner: Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJ)

Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJ) is committed to addressing health inequities through its REAL Data Integrity LEAN Six Sigma Project. RWJ’s focus on clean-accurate data to identify opportunities for improved care has resulted in an increased use of interpreter services and an associated 30 percent decrease in readmissions of heart-failure patients. In addition, RWJ looked at transitional care for low-income patients to close the gap between patients’ discharge and follow-up visits to their primary care physicians. RWJ’s efforts resulted in a reduction of its overall 30-day hospital readmission rate from 13 percent in 2013 to 5.2 percent in 2014. This type of organizational-wide focus is evidenced through its work on diversity and inclusion. Since 2012, RWJ increased leadership diversity from 4 percent to 32 percent minority representation. Board diversity also has increased from 17 percent in 2011 to 22 percent today.

Honoree: AnMed Health in Anderson, South Carolina, is noted for:

• Use of a disparities dashboard that provides access to reliable REAL data.
• A centralized language service solution.
• AnMed Health Differentiology Leadership Academy that has provided 80 percent of the leadership team a two-month learning experience to identify “diversity blind spots.”

 Honoree: Rush University Medical Center in Chicago is noted for:

• Use of technology with a “disparities navigator” to examine different health outcomes among patients and target interventions.
• A longstanding Language Interpreters Program with a documented improvement in care.
• Pioneering work through their ADA Task Force.

 The AHA Equity of Care Award is presented annually and recognizes outstanding efforts among hospitals and care systems to advance equity of care to all patients and to spread lessons learned and progress toward achieving health equity. In 2011, the AHA joined four national healthcare organizations to issue a call to action to eliminate healthcare disparities by focusing on increasing the collection of race, ethnicity and language preference data; increasing cultural competency training; and increasing diversity in governance and leadership.