The coronavirus pandemic didn’t give rise to health inequities in the U.S. Rather, it revealed and exacerbated them.
That was the consensus of a panel at Fortune’s Brainstorm Health conference in Dana Point, Calif., on Monday, just over a year after the federal COVID-19 public health emergency ended.
“It exposed the deep fissures within our health care system,” said Dr. Uché Blackstock, founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity. “Many of us knew what those fissures were, but I think to a more general audience, it exposed them in a way that [they] had never been exposed before.”
Jayasree Iyer, PhD, CEO of the Access to Medicine Foundation, echoed, “Health equity has been a chronic issue for time immemorial.”
Age, sex and gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and digital literacy are among the determinants of health equity, defined by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as “the attainment of the highest level of health for all people.” In the U.S. for example, COVID-19 morbidity and mortality were higher among Black, Hispanic, and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, noted a 2023 analysis in the Avicenna Journal of Medicine.
The silver lining? The pandemic woke people up to the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in medicine, according to Dr. Hala Borno, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and cofounder and CEO of Trial Library.
“It emboldened organizations to talk about DEI when they weren’t interested or [didn’t have] the bandwidth to do so before,” Borno said. “But I think now is the time of reckoning where they’re starting to define what it means and how they can consistently apply it within the organization.”
The HHS Healthy People 2030 campaign touts a strengthened focus on health equity and offers a toolkit for organizations to improve their own health and well-being. While such initiatives are well-intended, Iyer said not nearly enough action has been taken to ensure people facing disparities are getting care—particularly on a global scale.
“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Iyer said. “But it can be done, and there are fantastic models out there on how this can be done…it’s about scaling that up.”
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