How to increase your workforce diversity (from organizations who actually did)

By Rachel Zuckerman

While simply having a provider of the same race and ethnicity does not guarantee a trusting relationship, as this study and others show, there is evidence that having a provider that shares the patient's race or language improves overall patient care. Patients deserve a choice in who they seek care from; representation in our clinical workforce is critically important.

It's unsurprising that Black and Hispanic/Latinx adults were less likely to report racial concordance with their usual provider, since only ~5.8% of physicians in the United States are Hispanic and only ~5% are Black or African American. This underrepresentation is certainly related to segregation and discrimination in medical schools, as the study's authors note, but also to systemic racism and economic injustice that have led Black and Hispanic people to be over-represented in the low socioeconomic status population. People who have their basic needs met, sufficient financial resources, and strong social capital are much better positioned to navigate the many hurdles on the way to becoming a physician.

Health care organizations must act—here's how

Building a diverse and representative workforce is crucial, and health care organizations are partly responsible for making this happen.

Advisory Board recently hosted an event inviting health care organizations to share innovative strategies they've used to successfully increase the diversity of their workforce to better reflect their community's demographic makeup in clinical and leadership roles. Eight organizations were selected to present as finalists during the virtual showcase.

The winner of the showcase was Family Care Specialists (FCS) Medical Group for their programs to train underrepresented minority students to become clinicians. FCS has taken a particularly robust approach, establishing a family medicine residency program that has trained 226 doctors over the past 30 years, 65% of whom identify as underrepresented minorities. While not everyone can start a new residency program, FCS has taken two steps that any health care provider organization can replicate:

1. Develop a robust network of partnerships with community organizations to support students' non-clinical needs. FCS maintains dozens of partnerships with community-based organizations, academic enrichment and tutoring groups, scholarship funds, afterschool programs, and more. This network of partners is informed by three decades of patient interaction and data analysis. FCS serves as a coordinator, linking patients and students to these partner organizations to address non-clinical needs that might create barriers to becoming clinicians.

    

2. View every student in your community as a potential future clinician. FCS has designed multiple “entry points” to reach students early and encourage them to consider careers in health care. For example, FCS clinicians begin talking to patients when they’re children about health care professions and education as a path to economic stability. FCS has cultivated partnerships with local high schools and colleges. After making initial connections with students interested in pursuing a health care career, FCS provides educational support, summer jobs, and research assistantships, as well as linking students to the community partner organizations mentioned above. While FCS is particularly well positioned to support students in becoming physicians, FCS also actively supports students on other health professions tracks.

To review an in-depth look into FCS' efforts, including how they secured financial support for this work, review our coverage here.

It takes every part of the health care industry

No matter where you sit in the health care industry, whether provider, payer, life sciences, education, you have a role to play.

Take L.A. Care Health Plan, for example, the third-place winner of the showcase. While L.A. Care does not directly recruit or pay physicians, they identified several ways they were uniquely positioned to address the lack of diversity of physicians practicing within the L.A. safety net. In 2018, L.A. Care launched the Elevating the Safety Net initiative, committing $155M dollars over five years to address the shortage and lack of diversity of practicing physicians in safety net settings. Part of the ESN initiative, the Provider Loan Repayment Program (PLRP) awards primary care providers up to $180,000 in exchange for a three-year commitment to practicing in the safety net. Over 100 physicians have received a PLRP award to date, with 65% of awardees identifying with an underrepresented racial and ethnic group in medicine.

Parting thoughts

Building a diverse, equitable, and representative clinical workforce is one of the most important efforts you can make in our shared commitments to health equity.

While we shared just two examples of how health care organizations are actively working to advance racial and ethnic representation in the clinical workforce, there are countless people working across the health care industry to create a more diverse and equitable workforce. For more, check out the rest of the finalists from the showcase and review four lessons to increase representation in your clinical workforce.

Advisory Board's Andrew Mohama helped contribute to this piece.