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Transforming Care: Reducing Racial Disparities in Health Care by Confronting Racism?

Transforming Care: Reporting on Health System Improvement

A quarterly focused on new models of care, payment, and patient engagement for the nation's sickest and most vulnerable.

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In Focus: Reducing Racial Disparities in Health Care by Confronting Racism

Compared with whites, members of racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to receive preventive health services and often receive lower-quality care. They also have worse health outcomes for certain conditions. To combat these disparities, advocates say health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism factor into health care. This issue of Transforming Care offers examples of health systems that are making efforts to identify implicit bias and structural racism in their organizations, and developing customized approaches to engaging and supporting patients to ameliorate their effects.

 

It’s been 15 years since the publication of the Institute of Medicine’s Unequal Treatment report, which synthesized a wide body of research demonstrating that U.S. racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to receive preventive medical treatments than whites and often receive lower-quality care. Most startling, the analysis found that even after taking into account income, neighborhood, comorbid illnesses, and health insurance type — factors typically invoked to explain racial disparities — health outcomes among blacks, in particular, were still worse than whites.

This research prompted the Institute of Medicine to add equity to a list of aims for the U.S. health care system, but efforts to ensure all Americans have equal opportunity to live long and healthy lives have been given less attention than have efforts to improve health care quality or reduce costs. A recent Institute for Healthcare Improvement white paper called equity “the forgotten aim,” noting as did the 2010 Institute of Medicine report, How Far Have We Come in Reducing Health Disparities?, how little progress has been made.

To reduce racial and ethnic health disparities, advocates say health care professionals must explicitly acknowledge that race and racism factor into health care. Less directed efforts to improve health outcomes, ones for instance that fail to consider the particular factors that may lead to worse outcomes for blacks, Hispanics, or other patients of color, may not lead to equal gains across groups — and in some cases may exacerbate racial health disparities.

Addressing social factors like unstable housing that can lead to poor health is important, but it’s also necessary to acknowledge past and present policies — redlining, eviction procedures, and disinvestment in low-income communities for example — that fuel housing instability. “As health care organizations, payers, and others focus on social determinants and population health, we have a responsibility to ask: To what degree are our approaches grounded in a framework that addresses structural racism and equity?” says Rishi Manchanda, M.D., president and CEO of Health Begins, a nonprofit that helps health care and community organizations address social determinants of health.1 “If we can’t answer that question with rigor and candor, even our most innovative solutions might perpetuate inequity and illness, not prevent it.”

In this issue of Transforming Care, we consider the roles of implicit bias and structural racism in creating and perpetuating racial health disparities. Implicit bias refers to learned stereotypes and prejudices that operate automatically and unconsciously, while structural racism takes into account the many ways societies foster racial discrimination through housing, education, employment, media, health care, criminal justice, and other systems. We focus on these factors more than interpersonal racism, or negative feelings or prejudices that play out between individuals, because while the latter is important the former are more likely to be undetected or unacknowledged factors. We offer examples of health systems that are making deliberate efforts to identify how implicit bias and structural racism play a role in their work, and developing customized approaches to engaging and supporting patients to ameliorate their effects. Many are taking part in the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Pursuing Equity Initiative or have been recognized by the American Hospital Association’s Equity of Care Awards. Most of our examples relate to health disparities among black patients; we’ll delve into health disparities among Hispanics in a future issue.

Addressing Racial Disparities in Cancer Treatment

Greensboro, N.C., is remembered as the site of one of the first “sit-ins” of the Civil Rights movement. In 1960, a group of black college students refused to leave a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter, coming back day after day. The incident garnered widespread attention and prompted similar protests across the South. The city’s role in desegregating health care is less well known. In 1962, George Simkins, Jr., a Greensboro dentist, and other black dentists, physicians, and patients filed a lawsuit claiming that federal support for the Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital and Wesley Long Hospital, local institutions that served only white patients, was unconstitutional. (One of Simkins’ patients had an abscessed tooth and needed surgery; Greensboro’s black hospital didn’t have space for him and the whites-only hospitals refused to treat him.) While the plaintiffs initially lost, they appealed, resulting in the Supreme Court decision, Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Hospital, that set in motion the desegregation of hospitals throughout the South.

Alvin Blount, M.D. and Cone Health CEO Terry Akin

Cone Health CEO Terry Akin shakes the hand of Alvin Blount, M.D., one of the plaintiffs in the 1963 Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Hospital Supreme Court decision that — along with Medicare regulations, the Civil Rights Act, and other policies — desegregated hospitals in the South.

In 2003, a group of Greensboro community organizers invited researchers from the University of North Carolina School of Public Health to form the Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative, an effort to understand and address the lingering effects of segregation. One of the group’s first activities was to conduct focus groups among black and white members about their health care experiences. Many said they had experienced discrimination in a health care setting, with several stories relating to women’s experiences with breast cancer treatment.

The group then conducted a study exploring how widespread such experiences were, and whether they affected breast cancer treatment outcomes. Community members helped develop the research questions, conduct interviews, and analyze the results. “This was an important piece of the collaborative,” says Christina Yongue, M.P.H., coordinator of the Greensboro Cancer Care and Racial Equity study. “We made sure the community had full participation in every step of the research process. This was because of historical distrust among black Greensboro residents for Cone hospital, and because of more general distrust of clinical research going back to Tuskegee.”

After this initial research, the collaborative sought to test whether customized supports could improve the experiences of black women undergoing treatment for early-stage breast cancer. They also examined the experiences of black men or women with early-stage lung cancer, in part to see whether black women’s experiences with breast cancer treatment were related to their gender as much as race. The Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative partnered with Cone Health’s Wesley Long Cancer Center and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Hillman Cancer Center in a project known as ACCURE (Accountability for Cancer Care Through Undoing Racism and Equity). Patients were randomly selected and invited to join the ACCURE study and then randomized into intervention and control groups. They found that at both cancer centers, black men and women with early-stage breast or lung cancer were less likely to complete treatment than white patients (81% of black patients completed treatment, compared with 87% of white patients), even after taking into account patients’ age, comorbid illnesses, health insurance, income, and marital status.

Breast Cancer Mortality Disparities

As a first step in addressing these disparities, all staff members at the two cancer centers were offered training from the Racial Equity Institute, which included sessions on racial disparities documented in the national cancer registry and the roles of racial bias and gatekeeping in health care. Staff and members of the collaborative also mapped out the steps of cancer treatment, from diagnosis through treatment and recovery, and then interviewed patients to understand points of breakdown. Several black women who had survived breast cancer said they had experienced poor treatment, including instances when physicians didn’t take time to explain their diagnoses and options, front-desk staff who treated them with disrespect, and lack of support in dealing with complications. A real-time patient registry, including data stratified by patients’ race, was created to track missed appointments and treatment milestones, and a physician champion shared clinical outcomes with his colleagues.

Specially trained ACCURE nurse navigators worked with patients to ensure they understood their treatment options and had financial and social supports. When a patient missed an appointment or treatment milestone (e.g., their first chemotherapy infusion), the navigator received an alert and reached out to investigate the reason and offer help with common problems, including financial concerns related to insurance approvals, juggling family schedules, or handling pain and other symptoms. Prior to this intervention, navigators would offer patients a notebook of resources, but typically not follow up unless patients made a request. “Someone would have to have a lot of health literacy to understand all of the things in the notebook and feel empowered enough to reach out,” says Yongue. “The model did not make it easy for a patient going through a traumatic experience.” The navigators worked with patients for up to three years, from diagnosis through treatment and recovery.

In some cases, the ACCURE navigator worked to overcome patients’ distrust, says Beth Smith, R.N., who serves as Cone Health Cancer Center’s patient navigation program manager. “I had a patient tell me that she heard there is a cure for cancer and they are keeping it from patients,” Smith says. “I talked with her about how her care team did not want to see her or any patient suffer and we’re here to do whatever is needed to care for her.”

After the ACCURE study, treatment completion rates increased among all patients, but they increased more among the intervention group, with 91 percent of black patients and 89 percent of white patients finishing their cancer treatment.

Promoting Cancer Screening Among Racial and Ethnic Minorities

Cone Health and other cancer care providers also have worked to address racial disparities in cancer outcomes by encouraging patients of color to obtain regular screenings. Minneapolis-based HealthPartners, which has been stratifying data on its patients’ experiences and outcomes by race and ethnicity for more than a dozen years, found that rates of screening for colorectal cancer among minority patients lagged rates among white patients (in 2009, 43% of patients of color who were candidates for screening completed it vs. 69.2% of white patients).

Focus group research uncovered concerns among many minority patients about the invasiveness and inconvenience of the traditional colonoscopy. Over the years, HealthPartners has leveraged several different tools to try to decrease the gap, including adding decision support and proactively reaching out to patients. In August 2017, the health system sent a home colon cancer screen, known as FIT (fecal immunochemical test), to more than 3,000 patients of color.2 They also encouraged physicians to avoid describing the traditional colonoscopy as the “gold standard” of screening because it implied FIT was inferior when the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force made no distinction. By the end of 2017, three months after this intervention began, an additional 757 more patients of color had been screened. Altogether, the gap in screening rates between white patients and patients of color narrowed significantly, from 77.7 percent for white patients to 70.1 percent for patients of color. HealthPartners hopes to continue building on this momentum and has plans for continued FIT mailings.

Kaiser Permanente has taken a similar approach to encouraging more patients of color to get screened for colorectal cancer; in 2009, screening rates among Latino members, in particular, lagged white members by 5 percentage points. After doing ethnographic research that suggested some racial and ethnic minorities were concerned about taking time off work for a colonoscopy and were more likely to respond to a message about treating cancer rather than finding it, Kaiser Permanente created photo novellas (animated comics using photographs) depicting Latino family members trying to convince their loved one to use FIT. This and other initiatives led to an increase in colorectal cancer screening among Latino patients from 65.7 percent in 2009 to 77.3 percent in 2018 (compared to 80% among whites).

Stop Colon Cancer in its Tracks

Kaiser Permanente photo novella depicting Latino family members trying to convince their loved one to use FIT.

Improving Control of Chronic Conditions

Kaiser Permanente also has sought to improve control of chronic conditions among minority patients, which required a different approach, according to Winston Wong, M.D., the health system’s medical director of community benefit and director of disparities improvement and quality initiatives. While something like cancer screening happens once every few years, chronic care management “requires a continuous care relationship that builds around issues of trust,” he says.

Kaiser Permanente also has focused on disparities that have a high cost in terms of illness and death. For example, it has reduced the gap between white and black patients with controlled hypertension. “That was really important to us because it represents real morbidity, real mortality — people dying of strokes and heart attacks that could have been prevented if their blood pressure were controlled,” Wong says.

As part of the effort, which spanned eight regions, Kaiser Permanente’s clinicians sought to counter misconceptions reported by some black patients that dying from high blood pressure is “natural” by encouraging clinicians to be clear about the risks and dogged in their efforts to encourage patients to come in for treatment. It also has partnered with the American Heart Association on the national Check. Change. Control. campaign, which seeks to reduce disparities in blood pressure control by empowering people to monitor their own blood pressure and encouraging others in their networks to do so. In San Diego, for example, parishioners in 20 predominantly black churches were trained in how to monitor their blood pressure and coach others.

Between 2009 and 2017, Kaiser increased the percentage of African Americans whose hypertension was controlled from 75.3 percent to 89.6 percent, bringing the rate within 2.2 percentage points of the rate among white members.

Targeting Maternal Morbidity and Mortality

Serena Williams’s postpartum complications and the story of Shalon Irving, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who studied racial disparities in health care and died three weeks after giving birth from complications of high blood pressure, have focused attention on racial disparities in maternal mortality and morbidity (e.g., deaths or complications related to pregnancy and childbirth). Black mothers die from pregnancy-related complications at three to four times the rate of white women. And while maternal mortality has been dropping in Sub-Saharan Africa, rates actually increased in the United States from 2000 to 2014. Socioeconomic status, education, and other factors do not appear to protect black women from this risk, while factors including smoking, drug abuse, and obesity do not explain the differences.

Maternal mortality disparities

These findings have led some health care researchers to suggest that the experience of being a black woman in America is, itself, a risk factor — and that attention must be paid both to black women’s level of stress throughout their lives and how they are treated by health care professionals. “There’s often an assumption in the medical world that racial disparities are due to something genetic, when in fact it might be racism,” says Neel Shah, M.D., assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School. “We’re taught that racism is evil so it’s hard to recognize that in ourselves. But the studies suggest, for example, that we believe black women less when they express symptoms, and we tend to undervalue their pain.”

Some health systems and departments of health are working to address these disparities, often by offering women of color the support of doulas or more closely monitoring them after delivery, a point of vulnerability evident in a report on maternal mortality reviews in nine states that found pregnancy-related deaths occurred more commonly within 42 days of giving birth than during pregnancy.

In 2013, marriage and family therapist and midwife Aza Nedhari, M.S., founded Mamatoto Village (Mamatoto means “the connection between mother and baby” in Swahili) in Washington, D.C. Her goal was to create a custom model of support for women of color during their pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum periods. Nedhari believes that typical doula training — a matter of a few days — is insufficient to address black women’s cultural needs or their comprehensive health needs. Instead, Mamatoto has adopted the community health worker (CHW) model, recruiting mothers from the neighborhoods Mamatoto serves and offering them two years of training, mentorship, and field work. The CHWs then specialize in one of three paths: 1) helping women with social problems (e.g., domestic violence or housing instability), 2) helping them initiate and sustain breastfeeding, or 3) helping them manage their health and wellness.

So far, four managed care organizations pay for their members to receive Mamatoto’s services. Last year, among 462 women served by the organization, 74 percent gave birth vaginally (compared with 69 percent of women nationally) and there were no infant or maternal losses. Ninety-two percent of women who received labor support attended their six-week postpartum appointment, and 89 percent were able to initiate breastfeeding (compared with 79 percent of women nationally). The average weight for newborns of mothers who received prenatal and labor support was 6.98 lbs. in 2017, compared with 6.07 lbs. for newborns of mothers who entered the program after giving birth. For more information about Mamatoto Village, read our interview with Nedhari.

The first obstacle we find is that organizations don’t have a shared definition of racism, so it is hard to even talk about it. If you think that racism is merely people saying mean things to each other and I think it is a system of advantage based on race it will be impossible to co-design any solutions together.

Abigail Ortiz, M.S.W., M.P.H. director of community health programs, Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center

Liberation in the Exam Room

Ten years ago, Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center, a Boston primary care clinic associated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, launched an effort to understand why there were such stark health inequities between white youth and youth of color in their neighborhood. They noted how the obvious divisions — gentrified blocks with nice cafes and rehabbed housing occupied by mostly white, middle-class residents, and weedy blocks with deteriorated housing occupied by mostly black and Latino poor residents — affected their patients’ health. This exploration, which included convening a group of white and black teens in a racial justice leadership project, led to a number of initiatives, including: offering training for its 100 staff, others at Brigham and Women’s hospital, and community partners to understand the history and current impacts of racism; creating a shared glossary of terms related to racism and other forms of injustice; partnering with nonprofits; and advocating for policy changes to address the root causes of racial health inequities.

As described in the clinic’s Liberation in the Exam Room toolkit, some clinicians at Southern Jamaica Plain and elsewhere in Boston are now piloting ways to ask patients about their racial and cultural identities, instead of making assumptions, and whether they have experienced racism in health care. “One of the techniques that we learned about early on from one of the residents is to say many of my patients have experienced the effects of racism in health care. Do you have any experiences to share along those lines?” says Juan Jaime De Zengotita, M.D., Southern Jamaica Plain’s medical director. “Framing it as something that happened to other people might make others feel like they can speak up.” As word spread to patients and other staff about this pilot, they began requesting visits with doctors who were participating. “I got a flood of e-mails from people of color asking for a list of the doctors,” says Abigail Ortiz, M.S.W., M.P.H., director of community health programs.

Structural Racism, Transportation, and Missed Appointments

Lessons

These examples illustrate the benefits of studying racial and ethnic differences in health care treatment and outcomes, conducting ethnographic research to get at the root causes, educating staff about the impacts of bias and structural racism, and making deliberate efforts to earn patients’ trust. They also offer lessons about what it may take to go beyond these nascent steps and make the pursuit of health equity a common practice. These include:

Prioritizing the measurement of health disparities within institutions and among providers. Minnesota, which requires health care providers to track racial and ethnic disparities in treatment for a wide range of conditions, has encouraged this by publicly reporting performance on these metrics. The Health of Boston report, published by Boston Public Health Commission, highlights racial and ethnic disparities by neighborhood, an approach that offers actionable insights to providers interested in responding to local needs. But thus far many local and state governments, and the federal government, have not collected, published, or leveraged data on racial health disparities in ways that could prompt action.

Even without public reports, health systems can get a sense of disparities from their existing data. In a review, Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., discovered minorities were unrepresented not only in their clinical trials — a national phenomenon — but as patients. Interviews with Tampa residents revealed many hadn’t realized they could call and ask for appointments. “They thought they had to be referred,” says B. Lee Green, Ph.D., vice president of diversity, public relations, and strategic communications. “We have done a lot of community education since,” leading to a mix of patients that is more representative of the community.

Building partnerships to enable patients to play a meaningful role in developing solutions. Many health care organizations partner with community advisory boards or collect patient-reported experiences and outcome measures to identify potential problems. Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center convened teen workshops to gain insights about the struggles they face, while Cone Health tapped cancer survivors’ expertise to identify ways the health system didn’t serve them. This work may lead to customized interventions rather than standardized protocols. “When we see disparities, particularly around clinical performance, we tend to think about amplifying methodologies that we use for the mainstream population and thinking that is going to produce better results,” Wong says. “But what we are learning is to take some responsibility for understanding the differences among various groups in terms of their attitudes, their access to care, and relevant cultural issues and factor those in when we design quality initiatives.”

Making racial equity a strategic priority. Efforts to reduce racial disparities must go beyond cultural competency or workforce diversity initiatives. At HealthPartners, “key equity measures are built into our scorecards, our health equity sponsor group meets regularly, and equity is a standing topic at every board of directors’ quality committee meeting. That has helped keep us on track,” say Brian Lloyd, who oversees HealthPartners’ equity initiatives. The health system has trained more than 170 “equitable care champions,” employees who go through training on implicit bias and cultural humility and then take responsibility for explaining the rationale for equity initiatives to colleagues. The health system also takes advantage of opportunities to facilitate open discussions about racial bias, as it did in July 2016 after Philando Castile, a local African American man, was shot by a police officer during a traffic stop.

In the end, advocates say, it’s important to realize that while racism is a large and multifaceted problem, there are concrete steps health care providers can and should take. “Because we are talking about structural racism — something that is such a broad and deep force in our society — it is tempting to say we are a small organization, what are we going to do about this? We don’t have the power to control national policy or address all these big forces,” says Tom Kieffer, executive director of Southern Jamaica Plain Health Clinic. “For us, it was important just to recognize that we can start small and be explicit about what we are trying to address.”

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NOTES

1 Health Begins recently hosted a webinar on “Equity and Structural Racism: Challenges and Opportunities for Healthcare.”

2 Patients identified as speakers of Hmong, Oromo, Somali, Spanish, or Vietnamese received instructions and follow-up calls in their first language.

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Martha Hostetter, Consulting Writer and Editor, Pear Tree Communications

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Citation

Martha Hostetter and Sarah Klein, “In Focus: Reducing Racial Disparities in Health Care by Confronting Racism,” Transforming Care (newsletter), Commonwealth Fund, Sept. 27, 2018. https://doi.org/10.26099/1hjp-ct50

A Community-Based Approach to Reducing Disparities in Maternal Health Outcomes

A Q&A with Aza Nedhari, M.S.
Aza Nedhari

Aza Nedhari, M.S., is executive director and cofounder of Mamatoto Village, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit that trains and deploys community health workers to support women through pregnancy, childbirth, and the first months of parenting. Nearly 90 percent of Mamatoto Village’s clients are African American women, who as a group suffer dramatically worse maternal health outcomes than other women, including higher death rates and more complications during pregnancy and postpartum. Four Medicaid managed care plans offer Mamatoto’s services to their members. Transforming Care spoke with Nedhari about her program and her efforts to address what she sees as the root causes of these disparities.

Transforming Care: Where did the idea for Mamatoto Village come from?

Nedhari: I started thinking about creating a wellness center and space for families when I was an undergrad at Temple University. The idea for it evolved as I began training as a doula and then a midwife. I was shocked by how inadequate doula training was generally and in particular for meeting the needs of women of color. I wanted to develop a culturally specific training program that looked at women not just in the context of a birth experience but through the life cycle. My cofounder and I initially planned to train people to provide supportive services to women who could not afford it or maybe just wanted care from women of color.

Transforming Care: You refer to your employees as perinatal health workers. How does their job differ from doulas?

Nedhari: Coaching a woman through a birth is a small component of what they do. Our employees help women with domestic violence, housing, and complex mental health issues — with a goal of creating stability so women can they can take care of themselves and their families. That’s why the community health worker model works well. They get two years of training with a perinatal health focus. Once they start working with us, they specialize: one may focus on lactation, while another focuses on health and wellness including helping more high-risk women manage preexisting morbidity. Having these defined roles helps to prevent burnout among staff and creates a sense of shared responsibility.

 

Mamatoto Village 2017 Client Numbers

 

Transforming Care: There have been a number of theories as to why African American women have dramatically worse outcomes than white women and women who have recently immigrated from Africa, including theories about toxic stress, untreated chronic disease, and provider bias. What’s your sense of the problem?

Nedhari: It’s all of the above. For many women, pregnancy is the first time they have consistent engagement with the health system. It’s a tipping point by which all decisions we’ve made along the way come to a head. If at that point they encounter a system that doesn’t value them as people, they may disengage. Structural racism also plays a central role. It translates into stress because it creates a system in which people are oppressed — economically, through education, through the food that’s available in their communities. When you layer these things together, it sometimes makes an already challenging situation like childbirth tragic. When we meet with women we want to understand all of these dimensions: What kind of schooling did this woman actually get? What type of stress is she experiencing? What kind of trauma is she holding in her body? What is her support system?

Transforming Care: What have you learned from the surveys you conduct about women’s experiences with their obstetric care providers?

Nedhari: Most women report having a positive experience with their providers, but among those who are dissatisfied, the most common complaint is lack of respect. Many say they don’t have enough time during medical visits or don’t feel things were adequately explained. Another thing that comes up often is the feeling of being pressured into procedures like labor inductions or cesarean sections. They feel they aren’t being told what their options are or given an opportunity to consider them.

Transforming Care: In news stories describing black women’s birth experiences, many women including Serena Williams describe having raised serious concerns only to have them ignored.

Nedhari: We hear that over and over. Most of our clients feel like they are not being heard when they present with symptoms. Or the symptoms are dismissed as a normal part of pregnancy or birth. We often have to step in and say these symptoms are abnormal. We may have to get other people involved in that woman’s care to make something happen for her. We’re often the first responder, observing what is happening, and can work with the provider to make sure the plan of care is realistic for the mom and is something she is interested in adhering to. We also can help reach out to moms who have missed appointments. Our goal is to partner with the provider. The providers can’t do our job and we aren’t attempting to do the provider’s job.

Transforming Care: To what extent are the women you work with distrustful of providers based on recent experiences vs. their awareness of historical injustices?

Nedhari: It’s really a combination of her own experiences and all the stories she’s heard and is carrying with her. Our goal is to help women advocate for themselves. Some women in our program who have been through domestic violence or sexual abuse don’t feel they have a voice to speak up. We help her find her own voice. Sometimes it’s asking about her priorities or it is role-playing communications with a provider, helping the mom learn how to have a collaborative relationship. We’ll say “You hired a person to have a service. What kind of customer experience do you want to have?”

Transforming Care: Where do you think we’d have the biggest impact in addressing maternal health disparities? People have mentioned instituting mandatory maternal mortality review boards, changing medical education, spreading models like yours. Where would you start?

Nedhari: I think it is complex because every community has a different need. At a macro level, we need more of what is already working. Spreading models like this would help because you are not only tapping into resources in the community, you are creating jobs where people don’t have the resources they need to access better food choices, better education, better housing, better everything.

Transforming Care: How would you change provider education?

Nedhari: There needs to be a course in medical school on the history of obstetrics and gynecology so providers have an awareness of eugenics and experiments based on race. People’s assumptions, stereotypes, biases, and racism also need to be challenged at the outset. Cultural humility can’t be taught through a cultural competency class you take online. If you are going to deliver care, you have to have a positive regard for the people you serve and the fundamental knowledge and skills to build a rapport with them. Medical schools need to make sure this is cultivated and nurtured. When we start to look at it from that light, we will change the people we send out in the world who are charged with holding life in their hands.

Transforming Care: What advice would you give others interested in replicating this model?

Nedhari: Ensure everything is equitable, down to the technology you use and make sure the model works for all of your staff — from the person who has a high school diploma to the person with a Ph.D. When we started we thought we could just provide education for our perinatal health workers and everyone would be well on their way. We soon realized we were a workforce development program as much as a perinatal support program. Not everyone has life skills like time management or budgeting. We now go over everything our staff need to be successful, including childcare and banking.

Transforming Care: What are your plans for the future?

Nedhari: Our goal is to apply for funding to scale. I want this to become a home visitation model that can be replicated by going into spaces where economic security is bleak, providing jobs, and really starting to build the wealth of the community. It’s not just financial wealth but a wealth of knowledge and access. We are continuing to evaluate the impact of our program and hope to use these data to move toward billing a capitated rate and sharing savings with the managed care companies we serve.

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Publications of Note: July–September 2018

Bundling Payment for Chronic Conditions Did Not Lower Costs or Produce Better Outcomes

Researchers looking at the performance of hospitals participating in Medicare’s Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) initiative for five medical conditions (congestive heart failure, pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, sepsis, and acute myocardial infarction) found no significant difference between the hospitals participating in the program and the control hospitals in terms of what Medicare paid for the care provided, patients’ clinical complexity, average length of hospital stay, emergency department use, hospital readmission, or mortality. The results suggest bundling for medical conditions may require more time, new care strategies and partnerships, or additional incentives. Karen E. Joynt Maddox et al., “Evaluation of Medicare’s Bundled Payments Initiative for Medical Conditions,” New England Journal of Medicine 379, no. 3 (July 19, 2018): 260–69.

 

ACOs That Serve a Disproportionate Share of Vulnerable Patients Achieved Greater Savings

A study of 333 accountable care organizations (ACOs) in the Medicare Shared Savings Program found ACOs with a higher proportion of dual eligible or disabled members had slightly lower quality or similar or higher baseline spending than other ACOs, but achieved greater savings ($212 vs. $51 for high-dual ACOs and $241 vs. $44 for high-disabled). These ACOs were equally or more likely to earn shared savings; just over 30 percent of high-dual ACOs earned shared savings compared with 25 percent of non–high-dual ACOs and 38 percent of high-disabled ACOs. Aditi P. Sen et al., “Performance in the Medicare Shared Savings Program by Accountable Care Organizations Disproportionately Serving Dual and Disabled Populations,” Medical Care 56, no. 9 (Sept. 2018): 805–11.

 

Adjusting for Socioeconomic Status Produced Improvements in Medicare Advantage Plan Quality Rankings

A study found that adjusting for Medicare Advantage members’ socioeconomic and demographic factors would have improved the relative rankings on measures of blood pressure, diabetes, and cholesterol control among plans serving disadvantaged populations. The researchers adjusted for sex, race/ethnicity, dual eligibility, rurality, and neighborhood disadvantage. After adjustment, 20.3 percent, 19.5 percent, and 11.4 percent of plans improved by one or more quintiles in rank on the diabetes, cholesterol, and blood pressure measures, respectively. Shayla N. M. Durfey et al., “Impact of Risk Adjustment for Socioeconomic Status on Medicare Advantage Plan Quality Rankings,” Health Affairs 37, no. 7 (July 2018): 1065–72.

 

Medicaid Expansion Increased Coverage for Substance Abuse Treatment But Didn’t Increase Treatment Rates

Researchers assessed changes in coverage and substance use disorder treatment among low-income adults with the disorder following the expansion of the Medicaid program in 2014. Using data for 2008–15 from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, they found in expansion states the percentage of low-income residents with substance use disorders who were uninsured decreased from 34.4 percent in 2012–13 to 20.4 percent in 2014–15, while the corresponding decrease among residents of nonexpansion states was from 45.2 percent to 38.6 percent. They also found there was no corresponding increase in receipt of substance use disorder treatment in either expansion or nonexpansion states. They say increasing treatment rates may require the integration of substance use disorder treatment with other medical services and clinical interventions to motivate people to engage in treatment. Mark Olfson et al., “Impact of Medicaid Expansion on Coverage and Treatment of Low-Income Adults with Substance Use Disorders,” Health Affairs 37, no. 8 (Aug. 2018): 1208–15.

 

Collaboration Among Health Care and Social Service Providers May Be a Factor in Lower Health Care Use for Older Americans

A study of U.S. communities in which older residents have lower rates of health care use and lower costs found those communities tend to adopt holistic, collaborative approaches to solving the medical and social problems facing this population. The study, which examined 16 hospital service areas, also found in low-performing communities — those with high rates of care utilization and costs — health care providers struggle to coordinate with social service organizations. Amanda L. Brewster et al., “Patterns of Collaboration Among Health Care and Social Services Providers in Communities with Lower Health Care Utilization and Costs,” Health Services Research 53, no. S1 (Aug. 2018): 2892–909.

 

Variation in Spending at the End of Life Linked to Availability of Physicians, Physician Attitudes Toward Hospice

Using data from the Cancer Care Outcomes Research and Surveillance Consortium study, researchers assessed the extent to which geographic variation in health care spending in the months before death can be explained by patients’ sociodemographic factors, clinical factors, and beliefs; physicians’ beliefs; and the availability of services. They found physicians in higher-spending areas reported less knowledge about and comfort with treating dying patients and less positive attitudes about hospice, compared with those in lower-spending areas. Higher-spending areas also had more physicians and fewer primary care providers (PCPs) and hospices in proportion to their total population than did lower-spending areas. Availability of services and physicians’ beliefs, but not patients’ beliefs, were important in explaining geographic variations in end-of-life spending. They note enhanced training to better equip physicians to care for patients at the end of life and strategic resource allocation may have potential for decreasing unwarranted variation in care. Nancy L. Keating et al., “Factors Contributing to Geographic Variation in End-of-Life Expenditures for Cancer Patients,” Health Affairs 37, no. 7 (July 2018): 1136–43.

 

Evidence Suggests PCMHs for Low-Income Populations Produce Better Outcomes, Lower Utilization of EDs

A study examining what elements of patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs) are typically provided to low-income populations and whether PCMHs improve health behaviors, experiences, and outcomes for low-income groups found PCMH interventions were usually composed of five of the six recommended components. PCMH patients also had better clinical outcomes, higher adherence to recommended treatment, and lower use of emergency departments. The study relied on existing literature on PCMH utilizations among health care organizations serving low-income populations; the authors note there were some limitations in the quality of the studies, including in some instances no assessment for confounding variables. Carissa van den Berk-Clark et al., “Do Patient-Centered Medical Homes Improve Health Behaviors, Outcomes, and Experiences of Low-Income Patients? A Systematic Review and Meta Analysis,Health Services Research 53, no. 3 (June 2018): 1777–98.

 

Vulnerable Patients Less Likely to Disagree with or Change Doctors

Researchers found Medicare beneficiaries who were older, less educated, and had lower incomes were least inclined to express disagreement with or change doctors. Compared with non-Hispanic whites, Asian/Pacific Islander and Hispanic beneficiaries said they would be less likely, and black beneficiaries more likely, to express disagreement. Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native beneficiaries were less inclined than non-Hispanic whites to change doctors. They concluded that reductions in health care disparities might be achieved if doctors and advocates encouraged vulnerable patients to express their concerns and perspectives and if communities and caregivers provide support for changing providers when care is poor. Steven C. Martino et al., “Speaking Up and Walking Out: Are Vulnerable Patients Less Likely to Disagree with or Change Doctors?Medical Care 56, no. 9 (Sept. 2018): 749–54.

 

Intensive Management Program for High-Risk Patients Shifted Spending from Inpatient to Outpatient Care Without Dramatic Cost Changes

A study assessing whether augmenting usual primary care with team-based intensive management lowers utilization and costs for high-risk patients found the intervention increased outpatient costs ($2,636), driven by greater use of primary care, home care, telephone care, and telehealth services. This expense was mostly offset by a reduction in mean inpatient costs (−$2,164). The study, conducted at five V.A. medical centers, involved primary care patients at high risk for hospitalization who had a recent acute-care episode. They received locally tailored intensive management programs providing care coordination, goals assessment, health coaching, medication reconciliation, and home visits through an interdisciplinary team, including a physician or nurse practitioner, a nurse, and psychosocial experts. Jean Yoon et al., “Impact of Primary Care Intensive Management on High-Risk Veterans’ Costs and Utilization: A Randomized Quality Improvement Trial,” Annals of Internal Medicine 168, no. 12 (June 19, 2018): 846–54.

 

ACO Patients with Comorbid Physical and Mental Health Diagnoses Report Better Physical Functioning When Practices Have Patient-Centered Cultures

A study assessing the extent to which practices with patient-centered cultures, greater shared decision-making strategies, and better coordination among team members have better patient-reported outcomes for patients with diabetes and/or cardiovascular and comorbid mental health diagnoses found patients receiving care from these practices reported better physical functioning and slightly better emotional functioning compared with less patient-centered practices. More activated patients reported better outcomes. Susan Ivey et al., “Patient Engagement in ACO Practices and Patient-Reported Outcomes Among Adults with Co-Occurring Chronic Disease and Mental Health Conditions,” Medical Care 56, no. 7 (July 2018): 551–56.

 

Homeless Veterans Benefit from Primary Care Teams That Specialize in Serving Them

A study assessing the differences in primary care experiences between homeless and nonhomeless veterans receiving care at Veterans Health Administration facilities with homeless-tailored primary care teams and those without, found facilities with these programs appear to offer a better primary care experience for homeless versus nonhomeless veterans, reversing the pattern of relatively poor primary care experiences often associated with homelessness. Audrey L. Jones et al., “Differences in Experiences with Care Between Homeless and Nonhomeless Patients in Veterans Affairs Facilities with Tailored and Nontailored Primary Care Teams,” Medical Care 56, no. 7 (July 2018): 610–18.

 

The Potential and Risk Associated with the CHRONIC Care Act

The authors of this commentary describe the promise and pitfalls of the recently enacted CHRONIC Care Act, which gives Medicare Advantage plans opportunities to increase the flexibility of their benefit offerings in 2020. The act allows plans to offer nonmedical supplementary benefits to address the needs of patients with chronic conditions and eliminates the requirement that plans provide uniform benefits to all members. The change may enable plans to offer a wider range of benefits, including long-term services and supports (LTSS) such as assistive devices, meal and transportation services, and personal care services. Whether Medicare beneficiaries will see the true benefits of this change remains to be seen. That may be dependent on ensuring plans are not adversely affected by risk selection that may occur if the sickest beneficiaries who require the costliest care switch from traditional Medicare to Medicare Advantage plans, without adjustment in payment to account for nonmedical needs. The authors offer an alternative approach: the development of integrated care organizations that would operate like ACOs but have broader responsibility for meeting LTSS needs. Amber Willink and Eva H. DuGoff, “Integrating Medical and Nonmedical Services — The Promise and Pitfalls of the CHRONIC Care Act,” New England Journal of Medicine 378, no. 23 (June 7, 2018): 2153–55.

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Editorial Board, September 2018

Special thanks to Editorial Advisory Board member Laura Gottlieb, M.D., M.P.H. for her help with this issue.

Anne-Marie J. Audet, M.D., M.Sc., senior medical officer, The Quality Institute, United Hospital Fund

Eric Coleman, M.D., M.P.H., professor of medicine, University of Colorado

Michael Chernew, Ph.D., professor of health policy, Harvard Medical School

Marshall Chin, M.D., M.P.H., professor of healthcare ethics, University of Chicago

Don Goldmann, M.D., chief medical and scientific officer, Institute for Healthcare Improvement

Laura Gottlieb, M.D., M.P.H., assistant professor of family and community medicine, University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine

Carole Roan Gresenz, Ph.D., senior economist, Rand Corp.

Thomas Hartman, vice president, IPRO

Clemens Hong, M.D., M.P.H., medical director of community health improvement, Los Angeles County Department of Health Services

Lauren Murray, director of consumer engagement and community outreach, National Partnership for Women & Families

Kathleen Nolan, managing principal, Health Management Associates

J. Nwando Olayiwola, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor of family and community medicine, UCSF School of Medicine

James Pelegano, M.D., M.S., assistant professor of healthcare quality and safety, Thomas Jefferson University

Harold Pincus, M.D., professor of psychiatry, Columbia University

Chris Queram, M.A., president and CEO, Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality

Sara Rosenbaum, J.D., professor of health policy, George Washington University

Michael Rothman, director of quality and operations support, The Permanente Medical Group

Stephen Somers, Ph.D., president and CEO of Center for Health Care Strategies

Mark A. Zezza, vice president, Lewin Group

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