Over the past decade or so, health systems have been adding new roles to their leadership teams, such as chief innovation officer, chief population health officer and chief wellness officer. Last month at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas, I spoke with Whitney Haggerson about the significance of her unique role: vice president of health equity and Medicaid at Providence.

“Thinking about a system like ours that spans seven states, we need a focus on Medicaid and on equity. We like to talk about equity as it’s everybody’s job, and caring well for patients on Medicaid is everybody’s job. But until we’ve built the framework to actually enable our clinicians to do that in an easy way, it’s really nobody’s job,” she declared.

Haggerson said that her main focus is making sure that Providence’s more than 120,000 employees are well-equipped to advance health equity and Medicaid, which involves providing quality care for patients.

“That looks like all sorts of things. It looks like being able to stratify our data by payer or by race or ethnicity. It also looks at how we can be alongside our operators and give them best practices. Oftentimes, they are bogged down in the day-to-day operations of our clinics and our hospitals — so being able to partner with them to say, ‘Hey, let us help,’ I think, is huge,” she explained.

The Potential for Dedicated Leadership Teams To Advance Health Equity in Medicaid

For instance, busy clinicians may not have things like screenings for social determinants of health or referrals to community-based organizations at the forefront of their minds. But with a dedicated leadership team focused on health equity and Medicaid, health systems can begin to make sure these types of things are embedded into provider workflows.

Haggerson also mentioned that her team has established a health equity fellowship for its employees.

“This was in response to our executives saying, ‘Folks want to do this work — folks want to care well for patients on Medicaid, and they want to ensure that there’s no inequities in access or outcomes. But they don’t know how — the skillset doesn’t exist.’ So we said, ‘What if we build the capacity to teach people how to do this?’” she remarked.

Read the full article about health equity and Medicaid by Katie Adams at MedCity News.