Must See Health Equity Resources

This guide from the American Hospital Association (AHA) describes the link between food insecurity and adverse health issues and outlines clinical and nonclinical approaches that hospitals and health systems can use to reduce food insecurity and the stigma often associated with it.

This webpage provides information on the causes and effects of food insecurity, ways to take action to provide food security and how to find food banks.

This Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) webpage provides answers to commonly asked questions regarding elder abuse—what it is, scale of the issue, possible consequences and how to prevent.

The University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute developed the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps website to give the majority of counties in the United States the data to help improve health equity in their communities. The data provides a snapshot of how health is influenced by where we live, learn, work and play.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced it is finalizing policies to support primary care, advance health equity, assist family caregivers and expand access to behavioral and certain oral health care.

Health equity is a central focus of the Healthy People initiative. Healthy People 2030 offers tools and resources to support efforts to advance health equity and now features disparities data for many objectives. Health care providers and others can track changes in health disparities, over time, to see where the nation is improving and where increasing health equity efforts need to be improved.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is abuse or aggression that occurs in a romantic relationship. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), IPV is related to serious health issues. This CDC website can help health care workers better understand IPV, and how they can help prevent it.

Child abuse and neglect are serious public health problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) maintains this website so health care workers can better understand chlild abuse and neglect. This CDC website also provides evidence-based strategies that can help health care workers prevent child abuse and neglect.

Elder abuse occurs when an older adult experiences an act that causes them harm. Abuse, including neglect and exploitation, is experienced by about 1 in 10 people, aged 60 and older, who live at home. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) maintains a website that can help health care workers better understand elder abuse. This CDC website also offers evidence-based strategies that can help health care workers prevent elder abuse.

To treat patients’ social needs, we must first identify those needs. The American Hospital Association created this guide to help hospital-based health care providers, patients and community stakeholders determine how to screen and identify the socioeconomic challenges some people may face.

This whitepaper from TMF Health Quality Institute describes key social determinants of health (SDOH) and how they affect health outcomes. The whitepaper includes examples of how provider organizations and hospitals and community-based stakeholders can work together to address SDOH.

This article discusses ways to improve patient transfers from one facility to another. Effective transfers helps ensure that all patients have access to quality care.

This article, from Optum.com, explores how commercial Medicare Advantage insurance plans can address social determinants of health (SDOH), just as Medicare or Medicaid do. According to Optum.com, addressing SDOH requires an evolution in coding capabilities within existing documentation systems.

The American Hospital Association shares these videos to help hospital-based health care providers explore ways to address the social determinants of health that directly affect their patients' wellbeing.

The Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) website, maintained by the American Hospital Association (AHA), houses reports and case studies, along with webinars and videos, on several SDOH characteristics. The AHA website also links to resources hospitals can use to better meet their community's needs while addressing health care disparities.

Where and how people live directly affects their heath. People experiencing housing instability have limited access to preventive care and are more likely to have infectious diseases and chronic health conditions. This website, maintained by the American Hospital Association, shares resources to help hospital workers better understand how housing instability affects health, and what they can do to ensure that people in their communities have access to affordable, stable housing.

People who do not have reliable transportation may find it difficult to access health care, which results in missed or delayed access to preventive health care services. This website, maintained by the American Hospital Association, shares resources to help hospital workers better understand how transportation issues affect health and health care outcomes, and what they can do to reduce transportation barriers in their communities.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has created a new state total cost-of-care model designed to enhance multi-payer alignment. The AHEAD Model has several goals: to collaborate with states to curb health care cost growth, improve population health and reduce disparities in health outcomes.

A new analysis of health and nutrition, conducted by a team from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, shows that social determinants of health (SDOH) significantly influence heart failure outcomes for people of color. The study also shows that patients with incomes below the federal poverty level face more challenges to overcome within the different categories of SDOH.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services offers a 4-minute, animated video that explains when a proxy response is allowed for Social Determinants of Health items.

This checklist, from the Eastern U.S. Quality Improvement Collaborative (EQIC), can help hospital staff assess how well the hospital has incorporated health equity best practices in its operations.

Pharmacists at the Pharmacy Quality Alliance (PQA) 2023 Annual Meeting discussed the role of data collection and analysis in the movement toward health equity. Panelists emphasized that a variety of data needs to be collected, including race, ethnicity, language, SDOH, geography, disabilities, sexual orientation and gender identification information. All of these factors play a role in narrowing the gaps in health care.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) continues to work toward achieving health equity in testing its payment and service delivery models. This article describe future CMMI efforts, which includes developing new models and revising existing models to promote and incentivize equitable care and increasing its collection and analysis of equity data.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid's health equity strategy will build on the Biden-Harris Administration's commitment to advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities through the federal government, as described in President Biden's Executive Orders 13985 and 14091.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released an updated framework to further advance health equity, expand coverage and improve health outcomes for the more than 170 million individuals supported by CMS programs.

In this strategic plan, the National Institutes of Health explains how it hopes to grow and sustain diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) across all of the agency's activities. The strategic plan has three objectives: enhancing DEIA through structural and cultural change; implementing organizational practices to center and prioritize DEIA in the biomedical and behavioral research workforce and advancing DEIA through research.

QIN-QIOs will help providers develop a CLAS implementation action plan using the "An Implementation Checklist for the National CLAS Standards" checklist, developed by the U.S. Health and Human Services department.See pages 4-8.

This self-directed training course is designed for physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners. With growing concerns about racial and ethnic disparities in health and about the need for health care systems to accommodate increasingly diverse patient populations, cultural competence is a matter of national concern. This e-learning program will equip health care providers with competencies that will enable them to better treat the increasingly diverse U.S. population.

The CMS Office of Minority Health offers a comprehensive source of information on eliminating health disparities and improving the health of all minority populations, like racial and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community, individuals with limited English proficiency, and rural populations.

This toolkit can enable organizations to implement the National CLAS Standards and improve health equity.

This website, from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, promotes education, continuing education opportunities, and resources to learn about culturally and linguistically appropriate services (CLAS).

This website connects you to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) resources for social determinants of health (SDOH) data, research, tools for action, programs and policy. They may be used by people in public health, community organizations, research organizations, and health care systems to assess SDOH and improve community well-being.