Survey: Health Equity is a Priority but Barriers Remain | Healthcare Innovation

On July 28, Washington-based Vantage Health Technologies a part of the BroadReach Group, a global social enterprise, announced the results of its first annual “State of U.S. Health Equity Survey.”

A press release on the survey states that “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 percent of respondents believe that health equity is important for their organization to address, nearly half (43.5 percent) of the respondents said their organization has no roadmap to address health equity across their people, process and technology. Additionally, 45.3 percent have only a partial or ad hoc roadmap plan. Of them, 53 percent are unsure if it will be a priority in the next 12-18 months. Surprisingly, only 8 percent said that it would be a priority.”

Key highlights from the survey include:

The survey asked respondents to self-report top barriers to implementing health equity iniatives, the responses include:

Chris Esguerra, M.D., chief medical officer for Health Plan of San Mateo and one of Vantage’s medical advisors in the survey, was quoted in the release saying that “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. 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?”