Johns Hopkins Group Developing Community Health and Equity Measure for Hospitals

With the pandemic highlighting inequities in health access and outcomes, efforts are being made to measure the impact of hospitals on community health and equity.

The Bloomberg American Health Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity are working with IBM Watson Health to develop a method to measure for potential inclusion in the Fortune/IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals Program. A draft proposal has been created and the developers are seeking comment until Sept. 10, 2020.

The goal is to add a measure of how hospitals contribute to community health and equity alongside measures of healthcare quality and patient satisfaction in the Fortune/IBM Watson national hospital ranking. Adding this measure and counting it equally in overall rankings can recognize and reward hospitals committed to investing in and improving health and equity in their communities.

The draft proposal includes four components of a measure of community health and equity:

• Component 1: Population-level outcomes. This component assesses improvement in county-level metrics of community health and equity.

• Component 2: Hospital as healthcare provider. This component assesses whether hospitals meet best practice standards for offering preventive services. Examples include offering tobacco cessation services, violence intervention, and addiction treatment on site.

• Component 3: Hospital as community partner. This component assesses whether hospitals meet best practice standards for contributing to community health initiatives. Examples include supporting community health workers, home visiting, and healthy housing programs.

• Component 4: Hospital as anchor institution. This component assesses whether hospitals meet best practice standards for employers. Examples include plans to diversify boards and management, paying a living wage, and offering childcare to all employees.

Public comments will inform next steps in developing a community health and equity measure for hospitals.

Healthcare Innovation recently spoke to several health system executives leading equity efforts. Jaya Aysola, M.D., is chair of Penn Medicine’s Health Equity Alliance and executive director for the Penn Medicine Center for Health Advancement within the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, where she leads the charge to improve equity and inclusion within the health system and affiliated health science schools. In a recent interview, she said she believes there is a critical shift in interest in equity taking place, partly due to outside pressure from national health agencies and funders calling upon hospitals to look at their data and quality metrics through an equity lens. “They also are asking hospitals to think about equity and diversity as they train the next generation of physicians.”