Written by Ewa Panetta, Director, Community Health Impact and Engagement
Earlier this month, the MHA, in partnership with the MHA Keystone Center, hosted a member webinar highlighting the current and future state of health equity priorities and requirements from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and The Joint Commission (TJC) that impact acute care settings.
Accrediting and regulatory bodies are sending a clear message with the evolving requirements – health equity must be central to all quality improvement efforts. Simply put, high quality care is not attainable if care isn’t equitable.
Levering quality improvement as a tool for advancing health equity is a critical first step that helps hospitals meet the new regulatory standards, but we must move toward intentional actions that foster a culture of equity across healthcare systems.
The MHA Keystone Center created the Guide and Action Plan to Integrating CMS and TJC Health Equity and Health Disparities Requirements to provide guidance for implementing compliant health equity programming that goes above and beyond checking a box.
We collaborated with Julia Finken, senior vice president for accreditation and regulatory compliance, Patton Healthcare Consulting and Barrins & Associates, to facilitate the webinar. The purpose of the virtual meeting was to provide members with tools and resources needed to not only comply with the new quality improvement health equity requirements, but also implement robust health equity programming across their systems.
Here were the top three takeaways from the discussion:
- The MHA Keystone Center Health Equity Guide and Action Plan, along with supplemental modules, are valuable tools for implementing CMS/TJC compliant health equity programs. The action plan also provides hospitals with the tools necessary to track progress and document compliance across the regulatory and accrediting standards.
- Achieving the new health equity requirements requires embedding equity as a cornerstone of quality improvement efforts – from planning to goal development, design, interventions and measurement. Webinar participants expressed that demographic and social needs data collection and use are persistent challenges. We’ve created data resources to support members.
- As accreditation and regulatory requirements evolve, operationalizing the principles of health equity will require integrating equity into every aspect of care delivery and hospital operations.
I encourage members interested in learning more to watch the webinar recording.