Since our founding, Conduent Healthy Communities Institute (HCI) has been committed to health equity as a core principle of our work. HCI’s Social Justice and Health Equity Workgroup is a multi-disciplinary team that helps ensure that our internal practices and external offerings uphold values of equity, social justice, and inclusivity. HCI maintains a Health Equity Framework that guides our process for curating data, HCI Platform features and interface, and approach for community health assessment, planning, and evaluation.
HCI’s community-centric approach for improving health and advancing health equity includes:
- Examining disparities by analyzing data by gender, race/ethnicity, and neighborhood
- Analyzing the social determinants of health and root causes of health inequities
- Fostering community engagement and multi-sector collaboration
- Integrating health, social, and economic data for a comprehensive understanding of barriers and needs
HCI is intentional in our approach in selecting data and indicators to track progress and advance health equity.
- National Frameworks: We utilize national frameworks such as Healthy People 2030 and County Health Rankings to ensure alignment with the data we choose.
- Validated Methodology: We choose data that utilizes a validated methodology, comes from reliable sources, and has regular publication.
Based on HCI’s years of experience in improving community health and health equity, below are the lessons we have learned that guide best practices for advancing health equity in communities:
- Centralized data including health and social determinants of health data allows comparison and collaboration across sectors
- Data visualization and analytic tools showing data by race/ethnicity, age, gender, and location where available help identify where health inequities exist in each community
- Focusing on health equity through advanced analytics such as HCI’s SocioNeeds Index® Suite helps identify communities with higher needs based on socioeconomic determinants for a range of topics and set priorities for action
Health equity is best achieved through community work that includes multi-sector collaborations and involves representation from communities most impacted by health disparities. HCI utilizes a health equity lens in developing objectives and strategies that address disparities and include disproportionately impacted groups in strategy development. HCI works with our clients and their teams toward strategies that can impact the root causes of health inequities and move towards long-term improvement.
HCI uses the Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative (BARHII) Health Equity Framework and Data Across Sectors for Health (DASH) Framework to guide decision making to advance health equity. BARHII’s conceptual framework illustrates the connection between social inequalities and health, and focuses attention on measures which have not characteristically been within the scope of public health. The BARHII framework helps inform the types of indicators and strategies HCI can utilize and promote in our work to advance health equity.