How Healthcare Orgs Can Improve Their Health Equity Measures
For organizations that seek to comply with NCQA’s health equity measures, community partnership will be vital.
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- When the nonprofit behind the most popular performance measurement tool implemented health equity measures, it begged the question: how can healthcare organizations measure equity?
Healthcare industry leaders recognize the importance of the overarching issue. Almost 90 percent of healthcare executives agreed that health equity should be one of the industry’s priorities.
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“We know what we can’t see and what we can’t measure, we can’t fix. And so, this is where measurement and accountability come into such an important space right now as we’re talking about healthcare quality,” Bryan Buckley, DrPH, director of health equity initiatives at the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), told Healthcare Strategies.
NCQA, which established and oversees the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS), relaunched its Healthcare Distinction Award as the Health Equity Accreditation and Health Equity Accreditation Plus programs to assess and differentiate healthcare organizations’ health equity priorities through quality measures.
In the program, NCQA evaluates health equity within participating organizations. Internal health equity measurement was a new category that NCQA added. Incorporating this factor gives greater insight into the presence or absence of structural or systemic equity within the healthcare organization.
The second new aspect of the program focuses on how participants partner with communities to improve inequity. Healthcare organizations that score well on these measures can prove that they gather gender identity and sexual orientation data.
The Health Equity Accreditation Plus program focuses on the intersection between partnership and engagement, Buckley shared.
“We know our health equity accreditation standard isn’t perfect. It’s a learning journey as we’re on this health equity journey together. But we know it’s a good start,” Buckley emphasized.
For organizations that want to perform better on health equity measures, Buckley recommended that they hear from various perspectives when addressing health equity, particularly in partnerships with community-based organizations. He stressed centering health equity when establishing new processes.
Organizations should not wait until they have formulated the perfect strategy before implementing health equity reform and partnerships, Buckley encouraged listeners. They can start by projecting what they want others, including community-based partners, to think about their organization regarding health equity and letting that goal guide their efforts.
“One of the things that we know at NCQA is that high-quality care is equitable care, and there can be no quality without equity,” Buckley said.
