While addressing health inequity is a moral imperative, it also impacts the functioning and outcomes of healthcare organizations. To address disparate outcomes:

• Provider organizations can focus on cultivating cultural humility, trauma-informed care, and connecting patients with non-clinical support.
• Health plans can create cultural humility certifications and offer reimbursement for meeting social needs.
• Life sciences companies can go upstream by finding their health equity niche or expand clinical trial diversity and access.

A person’s health is not just a product of genetics and individual behavior, it is also a cumulation of socioeconomic and environmental influences.

• Efforts to address disparities solely at the patient level fail to recognize the broader community-wide determinants and root causes of structural inequity. 
• To advance health equity sustainably, leaders must address community-level factors that disproportionally impact historically marginalized groups.

Data is the backbone of any equity strategy. Healthcare leaders can take the first steps toward mitigating health inequities by:

• Identifying top opportunities for reducing disparities and inform initiatives to address them.
• Monitoring efforts and evaluate the success of their initiatives in reducing disparities in the short and long term.

Behavioral health needs are increasing across the United States — impacting people and costing healthcare organizations. 

• The behavioral healthcare sector struggles with a unique "meta" inequity that makes progress intractable. 
• This multilevel dynamic stems from two root causes: the long-standing devaluation and separation of behavioral healthcare from the rest of medical care and structural inequities like racism.

The United States is the only industrialized nation where maternal mortality and morbidity rates are increasing, underscoring the importance of action from healthcare organizations.

• This increase, however, is not distributed equally. Black and Native American patients especially experience the most devastating rates of complications. 
• Healthcare leaders can advance equitable outcomes by embedding best practice obstetrics protocols into workflows, identifying care gaps, and tapping into system and community resources.