Ensure equitable biopsychosocial care for all patients

The existence of inequities in care delivery and patient outcomes is a moral issue that can impact the functioning and outcomes of healthcare organizations. To improve 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 improving clinical trial diversity and access.

Address social determinants of health

• Efforts to address disparities that end at the patient level don’t address the community-wide social determinants of health or their root causes — intergenerational poverty and structural inequity. 
• To advance health equity for the long term, leaders need to address these community-level factors that impact historically marginalized groups at disproportionate rates.

Data is the backbone of any equity strategy. To take the first steps toward reducing inequities, leaders should:

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

• Behavioral health needs are increasing. 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. 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 frontline practice, tracking performance and identifying care gaps, and tapping into system- and community-based resources.