| | MARCH 20238UTLOOKHealthcare Tech IN MY OPINIONEarlier in 2022, I shared a story about my team's experience uncovering racial disparities in our patient's influenza vaccination rate that would not have been discovered had we not stratified our data by race and ethnicity. The article goes on to discuss the role that IT leaders can play in promoting the analysis of health equity and disparities within a health system by setting expectations for the appropriate use and analysis of outcomes data. 2022 was a year of great progress in this area for Nemours in a number of ways ­ from leadership to team structure to our Health Equity Pledge and finally, the launch of our standard REaL data reporting model. All of this work is anchored to our goal of building the healthiest generation of children, supported by our Health, Value, and Equity strategic pillar. The premise of all of this work is as follows: To truly improve the well-being of children, we need to define health beyond just the treatment of illness. The well-being of the whole child, from physical health to mental health, to educational outcomes and community well-being needs to be considered. By changing our reimbursement strategy to focus more on value-based care payment models, we can align our revenue with our mission in a way that sustains us as we make investments in whole child health. Finally, we realize we cannot truly support a healthier generation of children, or even succeed in alternative payment models if we leave populations behind by failing to act on inequities both in access to care and in outcomes.Our Analytics and Technology team is taking several key steps to support this work in 2023 and beyond, including partnering on staffing with our Office of Health Equity and Inclusion (OHEI), developing new standard data assets, and supporting enterprise communications/awareness-raising about disparities analysis.Staffing PartnershipIn 2023, my department will be adding a dedicated data analyst and an evaluation scientist who focus on supporting OHEI-related work. If we truly lived by the idea that addressing inequities is part of everything we are doing in terms of quality, workflow optimization, clinical standardization, etc, and not just a niche function, then you may ask why we need dedicated analytics staff rather than just leveraging existing teams. One way to think of it is that we want our data analysts enterprise-wide to focus on identifying disparities during the work. For example, different prevention rates, surgical outcomes, or even wait times across populations.While we will encourage all of our quality improvement experts, data analysts, process improvement experts, etc. to support issue the identification and escalation of any disparities that emerge during their work, our newly dedicated equity data analyst and evaluation scientist will also focus on measuring the effectiveness of interventions: How will we know we have been successful at closing a gap? What interventions should be scaled? What types of community feedback have we received about new programs? They will work with both qualitative and quantitative data, framed using our new standard REaL categories and reporting models and informed by healthcare and population health best practices.Standard Data AssetsOne issue we face as a large enterprise with many decentralized data teams is multiple models and methods for By Alexander Koster, Director, VBSO Analytics & Technology, NemoursUsing Data to Identify and Reduce Health DisparitiesAlexander Koster
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