Vantage Health Technologies a part of the BroadReach Group, a global social enterprise with nearly two decades of experience combining technology innovation with deep healthcare expertise, announced the results of its first annual State of U.S. Health Equity Survey. The survey found that while the industry sees health equity as incredibly important, there are few tangible steps and plans in place to address it.
In June and July of 2022, Vantage Health Technologies surveyed nearly 200 (192) executives and senior decision-makers within payers, providers and other healthcare stakeholders to understand how organizations address health inequities within their plans. The results found that while 95% of respondents believe that health equity is important for their organization to address, nearly half (43.5%) of the respondents said their organization has no roadmap to address health equity across their people, process and technology. Additionally, 45.3% have only a partial or ad hoc roadmap plan. Of them, 53% are unsure if it will be a priority in the next 12-18 months. Surprisingly, only 8% said that it would be a priority.
Additional top findings are as follows:
- 43.8% of those surveyed don’t know if they have any race, ethnicity or language data on their care population, and only 4.2% have this data on 75-100% of their population.
- 44.3% of those surveyed do not provide culturally and linguistically appropriate, person-centered care today and only provide care in English. While more than half are trying — 55.7% say they do this in some instances but not all and that there is room for improvement.
- 55.2% of organizations did not have racial or linguistic data on their employees
- Top barriers to implementing health equity initiatives were self-reported to included: budget, lack of or outdated systems, data challenges, leadership, guidelines and governance, resource limitations (including human resources), timing and prioritization, training and knowledge, and others.
“The data clearly shows the U.S. is still in its early days of addressing health inequities,” said Dr. John Sargent, founder Vantage Health Technologies and BroadReach Group. “While health systems work to improve data collection, technologies can be implemented now to help identify areas for improvement and create a clear roadmap. The most important thing is that payers and providers meet patients where they’re at and provide tailored care.”
“For true improvement in health equity, unless your population is totally homogeneous, you’re actually going to have to address things in a much more targeted way,” says Dr. Chris Esguerra, the chief medical officer for Health Plan of San Mateo and one of Vantage’s medical advisors in the survey. “Everyone focuses on data — or lack of data — as a gap and gets stuck there. Data is the thing that will help you understand that there is a problem, but do you know how to understand the problem?”
