Provide Whole-Person Care to Achieve Health Equity
Raising the Bar’s five principles provide the foundation for transformational action by healthcare payers, providers, and other organizations. This section focuses on healthcare’s role as a PROVIDER, including the essential role payers and other organizations play in facilitating the provision of healthcare, and outlines concrete actions, each with a commitment that healthcare can make to advance equity and excellence, and a set of tactical strategies.
Concrete Actions for the Provider
Achieving equity and excellence is grounded in the ability of individuals to access and receive the full range of affordable care they need, and experience being treated with dignity and respect.
Action 1: Actively promote and facilitate access to care for all in ways that accommodate diverse life circumstances and needs.
- Ensure access by eliminating or mitigating financial constraints and providing affordable care regardless of insurance status or ability to pay.
- Facilitate access by understanding the preferences and constraints of individuals, families, and caregivers, and accommodating them.
- Make accommodations to ensure that all healthcare settings are accessible to people with disabilities.
- Cover and provide care through diverse modes to accommodate diverse life circumstances and needs.
- Ensure access to essential healthcare services to all with unique healthcare needs.
Action 2: Establish and sustain a trusting environment where everyone feels they are welcomed and treated with dignity and respect.
- Make information and services available in preferred languages.
- Use multi-specialty care teams that can meet the range of interrelated physical, emotional, and social health needs.
- Create an environment that is physically, aesthetically, and culturally welcoming that shows respect for individuals and their families when they are receiving care.
- Provide coverage for and access to the comprehensive range of clinical, mental, behavioral, dental, and social services that are essential to delivering effective care.
- Ensure care and case management teams and other service providers are diverse and representative of the community served.
- Foster relationships that facilitate the sharing of relevant information between service providers and individuals and their families.
- Appropriately use disaggregated data on race, ethnicity, and other demographic factors to identify and address disparities, and ensure that care provided, and outcomes achieved are equitable and improve the health of communities.
Action 3: Provide holistic, effective, high-quality care responsive to plans co-created with individuals, families, and caregivers.
- Enable individuals and their caregivers to make meaningful choices about their care by creating systems for shared decision-making.
- Utilize care teams with diverse professional types and care providers, drawing from communities in which individuals receiving care live.
- Develop strong partnerships with entities and individuals across an individual’s care delivery network and social support system to implement holistic care plans.
- Create systems and processes that facilitate coordination and communication between the wide range of practitioners with whom an individual may interact, and enable them to work as a team.
- Collect, use, and share data on health and social needs to provide responsive and appropriate care.
- Ground care delivery, coverage, and payment offerings in the best available evidence, while understanding limitations.
- Develop and implement interventions to meet interrelated health and social needs as well as health needs at the community level, evaluate their impact, and share learnings.
Raising the Bar for Maternal Health: The Provider Role
To achieve maternal health equity, healthcare institutions must provide whole-person care.
What does this look like? Hospitals, health systems, independent women’s health and multi-specialty provider groups, and FQHCs:
- Provide maternal-newborn care tailored to diverse socioeconomic and cultural life contexts and needs.
- Establish and sustain a trusting environment where all childbearing families are treated with dignity and respect and feel welcomed.
- Provide holistic, effective, high-quality care responsive to the needs and preferences of childbearing women and people, as well as plans co-created with individuals, families, and caregivers.
Get started with the newly released Raising the Bar for Maternal Health Equity and Excellence guidance.
Watch: Provider Role in Advancing Equity
Featuring leaders from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Kaiser Permanente, Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Essex, Hudson & Union Counties, Jersey City Medical Center, and ChangeLab Solutions.
The Provider Role in Practice
The following set of vignettes highlight examples of organizations already advancing efforts in line with those actions outlined in the PROVIDER role.