Welcome to Just Equity For Health.
I started Just Equity For Health because I wish an organization like this existed when I was a medical student at Harvard.
Just Equity For Health (JEH) imagines a healthcare system where equity is embedded into everything we do: into how future healthcare providers are trained, into how patients are empowered, and into how care models (the delivery systems that care for patients) are designed.
Using advocacy, education and care model design, Just Equity For Health is a product of the unique time we find ourselves in. We all witnessed the devastating and disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on people of color and especially Black people. We also all witnessed the culmination of generations of systemic racism on display the summer of 2020 with the Black Lives Matter protests.
How we redesign our healthcare system to ensure that everyone has access to the best care is my life’s passion. I trained to be a medical doctor to care for populations, like those with HIV, who have faced historically high degrees of discrimination. As a young attending, I quickly realized that the doctor-to-patient services I could provide would never be enough if we did not also fix the very way our healthcare system is designed.
With the passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act which promised new payment and delivery models, many health systems embraced the opportunity to provide improved health services for their communities. As a Senior Medical Director for Clinical Transformation at Mount Sinai and then as the Chief Clinical Transformation Officer at Premier Inc., I had a firsthand seat — and impact — in helping large health systems and industry design and deliver innovative care.
As a Black woman in medicine — and someone with her own chronic medical condition — I know firsthand that systemic inequities are baked into healthcare delivery. I also believe that now is the time to call attention to and to work hard to address those inequities.
Just Equity For Health uses advocacy, education and care model design to do just that. Advocacy to bring attention to the areas that need fixing; education to teach our trainees, communities and fellow healthcare providers and leaders concrete ways to untether inequities from the care of our patients; and care model design to actually outline and implement ways to deliver care that keep an equity lens front and center.
It’s not by accident that I am launching JEH in June 2021, over a year after the devastating impact of Covid-19 laid bare just how much we need to fix in the US (and global) healthcare markets.
I hope you’ll join me in this work.
Just Equity For Health: https://justequityforhealth.com/
