AMA releases new toolkit with 5 steps to achieve racial, health equity

The American Medical Association (AMA) announced Wednesday that it is offering a new toolkit with five steps to help health systems insert equity into medicine and achieve optimal health for patients.

The tookit, "Racial and Health Equity: Concrete STEPS for Health Systems," is available via the AMA's online learning platform and is intended to help guide health systems through the initial steps toward making concrete improvements in racial and health equity.

“The AMA is committed to embedding racial justice, advancing health equity and partnering with others to identify, prevent and eliminate racism in our health system,” AMA President Gerald Harmon, MD, said in a statement. “The AMA’s newest toolkit will help guide health systems in efforts that promote positive cultural transformation and address the root cause of racial health inequities.”

Included in the toolkit are five steps, which are summarized below:

1. Leadership must step up and commit to taking meaningful action. The toolkit includes a two-phase path for hospitals and health systems to transform organizational equity goals.

2. Traditional organizational approaches to equity can be transformed by a commitment to learning. Better understanding racism in medicine is crucial to gaining a new perspective, and the toolkit includes tips for individual and group learning sessions to explore knowledge gaps regarding health equity, racial equity, racism, and anti-racism.

3. Enterprise-wide data can illuminate inequities. Data can uncover racial inequities at both the patient- and community-levels. The toolkit includes a framework for using institutional data to improve health equity initiatives.

4. A clear path toward achieving health equity goals is needed to earn buy-in from the entire health system and community. Within the AMA's tookit is a roadmap for piloting what's termed a "SMART" project, using specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals.

5. Targeted quality improvement efforts should be undertaken across the health system to advance racial justice and health equity. The toolkit provides vanguard examples of health system-based initiatives to achieve these goals.

In the prepared statement, the AMA said that the toolkit represents the newest addition to a collection of more than 70 other toolkits that cover transformative medical practice solutions in areas including: practice efficiency, patient care, patient health, technology, and innovation. 

Download the tookit here.

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