Project Summary
Background: Growing interest in healthcare system transformation offers valuable opportunities to tackle persistent racial, ethnic, and other health inequities. Yet, without focused, intentional action to advance health equity, these efforts are unlikely to reduce health inequities, and may even make some worse. PCORI research could be vital in helping decision makers find the specific strategies and interventions that work to reduce these inequities, but health equity and racial justice organizations, community leaders, and other stakeholders have not sufficiently engaged in ensuring these findings actually lead to improvements in health equity.
Solution: Families USA (FUSA) will work with national, state, and local health equity and healthcare leaders to ensure that evidence about interventions and delivery system designs that reduce health inequities effectively reaches key leaders and decision makers.
Objectives: FUSA will build an equity-focused dissemination infrastructure to ensure that relevant findings reach community leaders and decision makers in clear, actionable formats they can use to inform their priorities and policy making. It will also provide a feedback loop so that community leaders can convey challenges, opportunities, and research gaps back to researchers.
Project Aims/Activities:
- Grow and strengthen existing health equity leadership groups, centered on the project team’s Health Equity Task Force for Delivery and Payment Transformation and the Community Health Worker Sustainability Collaborative and create a broader Health Equity System Transformation Action Network (HESTA Network)
- Engage policy makers and community leaders to explain the importance of patient-centered outcomes research and its value in system transformation that advances health equity
- Develop and provide resources, trainings, and technical assistance to support the dissemination to and utilization of PCORI-funded research findings by community leaders and decision makers.
Outcomes/Outputs:
- A strong network of health equity and racial justice leaders is ready to broadly disseminate relevant PCORI findings and incorporate them into decision making
- FUSA and the HESTA network is a key, trusted source of information for decision makers and stakeholders seeking to understand health equity-related PCOR research and how it can inform their decisions
- FUSA’s HESTA microsite compiles resources that elevate disparity-reducing intervention findings, translates them into accessible, actionable language, and explains how policy makers and others can use them in practice
Patient and Stakeholder Engagement Plan: The health equity task force includes national and state-level health equity and consumer health organizations (such as NAACP and UnidosUS) as well as leading technical experts. The CHW collaborative includes safety-net providers, CHWs, and other national, state, and local leaders. There will be one to two in-person meetings of the task force and the collaborative each year, and ongoing engagement via teleconferences and email. Together, the project team will engage additional stakeholders to join this effort, such as community-based organizations, healthcare providers, and policy makers. FUSA will employ diverse tactics, including briefings, individualized outreach, media strategies, a microsite, reports, and infographics.
Project Collaborators: Members of the health equity task force and the CHW collaborative.