HealthPartners Institute, Minneapolis, MN
Equitable Care Educational Strategy

Background: The HealthPartners organization is a health plan and a health system comprised of several hospitals and clinics in the Twin Cities area. Equitable care has long been a priority of the organization, but most work has been done through individual departments, training programs, or individual entities within the larger organization. In 2015, leadership from Regions Hospital, a HealthPartners hospital, participated in the Disparities Leadership Program. Their work focused on creating an equitable care infrastructure at the hospital, with a goal of reducing healthcare disparities. As a result, the Regions Equitable Care Committee was formed. This committee meets monthly to continue work on identifying and reducing disparities. Members of this group also participate in the health system’s larger group, the Equitable Care Sponsors Group. NI V provided the perfect opportunity to create an equitable care educational strategy that aligned with the equitable care work of these committees.

Methods: To align GME with HealthPartners’ equitable care priorities, we partnered with leadership from the Regions Hospital Equitable Care Committee and the HealthPartners Equitable Care Sponsors Group, using their 4 main strategy areas to guide our work: (1) reduce disparities with information and best clinical practices; (2) support language preferences; (3) partnerships and engagement; and (4) knowledge, cultural humility, diversity, and inclusion.

Results: The Regions Hospital Equitable Care Video describes the Regions Hospital patient population and HealthPartners’ equitable care priorities. The video will be shown at new resident orientation and potentially at all other trainee orientations. The HealthPartners Institute Equitable Care Graduate Education Toolkit is a website of equitable care resources for educators. The toolkit is grouped by the HealthPartners Equitable Care priority areas and is organized in a manner that guides the user’s progression through each strategy area.

Conclusion: Both the Equitable Care Video and Toolkit will help give our residents and program directors a solid foundation in understanding healthcare disparities and in how to identify and reduce them. Future work involves identifying resident champions to lead from within their programs and working with the health system to further their community engagement priorities.