Health equity 'only moves as quickly as the speed of trust:' Expert
The health care industry is facing increasing pressure to focus on health equity in light of the coronavirus pandemic's disproportionate impact on minority communities.
Michellene Davis, president and CEO at National Medical Fellowships (NMF), says one key issue to address is greater diversity in medical and scientific staff.
"Those of us who have been in the health equities space have know that for a long, long time, that these structural inequities existed," Davis told Yahoo Finance as part of its ongoing series, The Economics of Health. She added that all the work in health equity "only moves as quickly as the speed of trust."
She pointed to efforts to overcome vaccine hesitancy in minority communities that either mistrust the government, are afraid based on their legal status, or are generally hesitant to engage in health care for a plethora of cultural or personal reasons.
It's why NMF focuses on ensuring minorities have greater access to and support for careers in the medical world. Davis said that data has shown that if a patient sees a doctor that is of the same cultural or ethnic background, health outcomes tend to be better.
"As we stand amidst a global pandemic and an international reckoning around systemic racism and social injustice, NMF finds itself uniquely situated to provide meaningful insights to the global conversation," Davis wrote in her first letter to colleagues at NMF.
On Tuesday, during an event hosted by drug industry lobby PhRMA, former president of the American Medical Association (AMA) Dr. Patrice Harris, said that not only does the industry need to get better at identifying systemic racism, but it must also find ways around individual biases as well.
"Let's be committed to coming to the conversation informed. Before you have a conversation on this, it does require some pre-reads, it does require some training and it does require a commitment to cultural change at the organizational level," Harris said.
She noted that the influential drug industry must show strength and willingness to address the issues.
"I think pharma can say the words: Say, 'Yes, we are not going to be afraid to say these words and have conversations, both from an organizational level, and within our own organization," said Harris.
Biden's Health Equity Task Force chair, Marcella Nunez-Smith, noted that it will take time to build trust that has been broken over decades in the U.S.
"We cannot unsee what we saw in 2020. And so it is now about what we do with this truth. The fact that people are naming racism, identifying it as structural and systemic ... that's how we start," Nunez-Smith said at the event.
For example, Nunez-Smith said she couldn't properly answer questions among the transgender community about the impact of the COVID-19 vaccine if someone is on hormone therapy — which points to a blind spot in the vaccine clinical trials.'
"There are too many that remain hidden and invisible in the data ... The list is not a short one, unfortunately, for where we can't even begin to have deep discourse because we don't have the data," Nunez-Smith said.
"Let us not work towards some imagined bias-free space. It's not about returning to segregated clinical care. Let's just bring a diversity of perspectives, a diversity of bias," she said.
Davis believes that the country is ripe for change and predicts lasting reform.
"Given the expressed tone of the Biden Administration, it is highly likely that the current 117th Congress will take action to ... address disparate health outcomes," she said.
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