Achieving Health Equity in Healthcare

The third and the last course of the Addressing Racial Health Inequity in Healthcare specialization will go through various approaches that are used to addressing racial inequity in healthcare., and the strengths and challenges of those approaches. You will explore legal, policy, and regulatory approaches to interventions such as Title IX in the United States. You will explore what is being done to intervene on providers to reduce differential care. You will unpack quality improvement and multiple approaches to leveraging healthcare systems and community partnerships to address access to care. You will also come to understand the history and role of community health centers in being critical infrastructure in addressing the health needs of diverse populations. Finally, you will be introduced to the workforce initiatives and the reparations that aim to close the racial and ethnic healthcare disparities gaps.

What you will learn

Week 1 | The Community Health Center Model

This week, we will learn about the community health center model and how it can help us achieve racial equity in healthcare. We will learn about how the community health center model is a critical provider of care and what it means to implement and sustain these types of models.

Week 2 | Anti-Discrimination Health Laws and Policies

This week, we will learn about anti-discrimination laws and policies. We will critically examine how laws and policies help us get closer to racial equity in healthcare while simultaneously critiquing the challenges of legal and policy mechanisms as interventions toward equity goals.

Week 3 | The Use of Provider Interventions to Reduce Differential Care

This week, we will learn about intervening at the provider level to address racial inequity. To understand the foundations of provider interventions, we must first have a basic understanding of concepts and definitions we often see associated with provider-level approaches to achieving health equity. We will then critically appraise approaches to intervention with providers.

Week 4 | Improving Quality and Access in Healthcare

This week, we will learn about what it means to improve quality and access to healthcare. We first walk through quality improvement and what healthcare systems do from a data collection perspective to improve quality. We will then examine in-depth how healthcare systems utilize non-traditional provider roles within the healthcare team, such as community health workers and enrollment assistants, to improve quality. We will examine what it means for hospitals to improve the health of their surrounding community.