A joint study by the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the UC Berkeley Labor Center found that two-thirds of the estimated 2.6 million adults who will become eligible for federal subsidies in California’s health-insurance exchange are Black, Latino or Asian, and 36 percent of those currently uninsured and expected to be covered under ACA have limited English proficiency.

While the ACA mandates that health plans be translated into appropriate languages in areas where 10 percent or more of the population speaks a language other than English, the bigger challenge is getting culturally competent information out to explain the new rules.

California is one of 18 states setting up its own health exchange to help newly insured people compare and purchase health-insurance plans. The remaining states will default to the Federal Health Exchange.

The California exchange chose its name—Covered California—because it translates well into several of California’s commonly spoken languages. The organization’s website has a Spanish version as well as one in 11 other languages, including Farsi, Khmer, Lao, Russian and Tagalog. The site contains clear information about what is covered and includes definitions of new healthcare terminology.

Consumers may well choose a health insurer based on the resources insurers can share about how patients will be cared for in a culturally competent manner under each insurer’s plan. WellPoint’s Anthem Blue Cross (WellPoint is No. 34 on The DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list) and Kaiser Permanente (No. 3 on the DiversityInc Top 50) are among the four largest insurers of the approximately 30 that will be offered by Covered California. WellPoint offers services in five languages  and has an online Spanish video that introduces members to its most popular programs. Anthem has produced a cultural-competence resource for physicians and healthcare professionals that is intended to help reduce health disparities caused by a lack of culturally or linguistically competent care. The new toolkit is available on a website dedicated to cultural and linguistic competency.

Kaiser Permanente has a link on its website to numerous in-language plan materials and just released a Spanish version of its healthcare-reform website. Kaiser, which provides healthcare as well as health insurance, also has a National Linguistic & Cultural Programs department that develop strategies to ensure meaningful access to healthcare and services for people with limited English. Kaiser presented its program to train and use staff members as bilingual translators and its Diversity and Health Video Series, a cultural-competence training tool, at a recent DiversityInc Innovation Fest!

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A sobering new U.S. Senate report indicates that nearly 57 million people in the U.S.—about one in five—live in areas where they do not have adequate access to primary healthcare because of a shortage of providers. This shortage is most pronounced in rural and low-income areas, and it means more emergency-room visits, less access to preventive care, and less chance of someone establishing a relationship of trust with a healthcare provider.

Access to primary care has repeatedly been shown to have a strong impact on health disparities: One study from 2005 showed that access reduced deaths among Blacks four times more than among whites—even after controlling for education and income. Findings such as this usually point to the value primary care provides in terms of early detection and treatment of conditions such as hypertension and diabetes, and in terms of the ability to be screened for cancers, such as colon cancer, which are more likely to be treatable if discovered early.

As the shortage intensifies, the Association of American Medical Colleges reports that, while there has been a decrease in Black men applying to, accepted to, and entering medical school overall, among all people who do apply, Blacks expressed a greater interest in primary-care fields than other demographic groups.

Blacks and Latinos are also willing to practice medicine in underserved areas more than any other group. Yet the gap will not be closed any time soon if the percentage of medical-school graduates does not better reflect the U.S. population: Over the past two years, the percentage of white entrants to medical school exceeded all other racial and ethnic groups by a substantial amount—57.1 percent in 2010 and 57.5 percent in 2011—while Black and Latino entrants were less than 15 percent of the total. Consider that Blacks and Latinos together are almost 30 percent of the U.S. population (and increasing rapidly, especially Latinos), and the gap seems even greater.

Further, these percentages of graduates are not necessarily even translating into similar percentages of practicing physicians. Blacks represent 14 percent of the U.S. population and only 4 percent of physicians, according to U.S. Census data and the American Medical Association Physician Masterfile, as reported by Kaiser Permanente. Meanwhile, Latinos represent 16 percent of the population and 5 percent of physicians.

In June 2012, Kaiser Permanente took a substantial step to close this gap: The organization expanded its relationship with National Medical Fellowships and contributed $1 million to support medical students through education and training programs. NMF is a not-for-profit organization that seeks to increase the pipeline of doctors, nurses and physician assistants from underrepresented groups by providing scholarships to medical students and by offering service learning programs to students in the health professions.

Cleveland’s University Hospitals is strongly committed to such efforts and has seen impressive results through its David Satcher Clerkship, a national model for recruiting Black and Latino medical students. Since the program’s inception in 1991, UH has increased its Black and Latino representation from 3 to 10 percent. The hospital’s Henry L. Meyer III KeyBank Faculty Minority Fellows Program is another of UH’s efforts to develop medical staff to provide culturally competent care.

The Mayo Clinic’s Minority Medical Student Career Development Programs are designed to help train students in meeting the needs of a diverse patient population. Mayo’s College of Medicine Diversity in Education Blog provides students a place to connect with each other and with those outside Mayo Clinic who are interested in working or receiving medical training there.

The post Can Black and Latino Doctors Solve the Primary-Healthcare Crisis? appeared first on DiversityInc.

The Affordable Care Act—which will insure 32 million previously uninsured individuals, most of them lower-income Blacks and Latinos—includes provisions for mammograms and colonoscopies, both critical to curbing breast or colon cancer at a stage when treatment can be effective. But what will really make a difference is culturally relevant outreach and education. Hospitals’ and physicians’ ability to provide culturally competent care is essential to alleviating these disparities. Watch this video for more:

As hospitals move toward more accountable care models, they’re starting some innovative programs: North Shore–LIJ Health System recently received a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to train undergraduates at HBCU Hampton University on the disparities in prostate cancer treatments, access to care and outcomes. The Cleveland Clinic holds an annual Minority Men’s Health Fair to raise awareness of diseases such as colon cancer, diabetes and heart disease, and holds clinics every week to encourage screening. Watch the video below.

Cleveland Clinic is No. 3 on DiversityInc’s Top 5 Hospital Systems.

The post Seizing the Opportunity to Curb Cancer Disparities appeared first on DiversityInc.

Blacks more likely to die of lung cancer than whites.

ADHD among Black girls rose 90 percent from 2001–2010. White children had the highest diagnosis rates, according to a Kaiser Permanente study, but Black children showed the greatest increase in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) incidence, from 2.6 percent of all Black children 5 to 11 years old in 2001 to 4.1 percent in 2010, a 70 percent relative increase. Latino children showed a 60 percent relative increase.

J. Nadine Gracia appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Minority Health.  Dr. Gracia will also head the Office of Minority Health (OMH) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The office is dedicated to improving the health of racial and ethnic minority populations through the development of health policies and programs that will help eliminate health disparities. Dr. Gracia, who has served as Acting OMH Director since November 2011, plays a key role in the administration’s Affordable Care Act outreach to underserved communities nationwide, and also leads the implementation of the HHS Action Plan to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities and the National Partnership for Action to End Health Disparities.

The post Health News: Segregated Blacks More Likely to Die of Lung Cancer appeared first on DiversityInc.

DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti recently interviewed Thomas F. Zenty III, CEO of the Cleveland-based hospital system. (University Hospitals is one of the 2012 DiversityInc Top 5 Hospital Systems.) Zenty discussed the dramatic impact of the Affordable Care Act and how the hospital’s diversity efforts in the workplace and the community are helping it survive. Read this article and other CEO interviews in our digital issue, and sign up for DiversityInc magazine.

Zenty spoke on this topic at DiversityInc’s event last month, Diversity-Management Best Practices From the Best of the Best. Click here for video of his talk.

Luke Visconti: What is the intersection of solid diversity-management initiatives and the reduction of healthcare disparities?

Thomas F. Zenty III: Many studies have shown that there is a direct correlation between people of diverse backgrounds being willing to seek care and knowing that people who look like them will actually be providing that care. So the intersection between diversity and disparities is rather significant. We want to make certain that we’re doing everything that we can to make sure that people of color will be able to work in our organization, hold positions of leadership—caregivers, clinicians and support staff—in order to make people of all backgrounds, colors and faiths feel comfortable coming to University Hospitals to receive the world-class care that we provide.

Visconti: How is diversity and inclusion a competitive differentiator for a hospital?

Zenty: There is no better way to gain the pulse of what’s happening in the communities that we serve than by having people who live and work in those communities actively engaged with us at every level. From an employee perspective, it’s critically important that we have people of diverse backgrounds who will bring skills, talents, perspective in order to help us to do a better job as we look to achieve our mission. We think it’s critically important for diversity to be well represented across our entire health system at every level, be it gender, religion, race, color. In fact, we’ve recently reached out to the Amish community because one of our hospitals has a very large Amish population, and we realized that we did not have a member of our board who was of Amish descent. As a result, we added a new Amish board member to our hospital, and he’s brought a lot in terms of a better understanding of the Amish community and the healthcare needs of that community.

The point is we need to look into the community to better understand who are the communities that we serve? Who best represents those individuals within those communities that we serve? And how can we engage them at every level, either as employees, as members of the board, as leadership-council members? And we want to make sure that we’re engaging everyone in the communities that we serve.

Visconti: You’re very personally involved in the community. Why?

Zenty: It’s critically important for an organization of our size in a community of this size, as the second-largest private employer in Northeast Ohio, to make certain that we’re going to be focused on diversity at every level within the communities that we serve. Our organizational values include excellence, diversity, integrity, compassion and teamwork. And diversity is one of the key components of the cornerstones of the work that we do every day in taking care of our patients and meeting our mission. As the leader of this organization, it’s critically important for us to be actively engaged in community activities to make certain that we’re not only aware of what’s happening in the community, but play a leadership role in advocating on behalf of many different agenda items. One of the key ones, though, is in the area of diversity in Northeast Ohio.

Visconti: University Hospitals has a 100 on the Corporate Equality Index, the Human Rights Campaign’s index of equality for LGBT people. Why is that important to you?

Zenty: The LGBT community is very important to us for all the other reasons that I stated in all the other populations that we serve. They’re very much a part of our community. We want to make certain that they’re recognized and represented. They have actually recognized us for our work in this regard, which we’re very pleased about.

Visconti: Your chief diversity officer reports directly to you. You also have hands-on interaction with people who are responsible for delivering results in diversity management. How important are these two things?

Zenty: It’s critically important that the chief diversity officer reports to the chief executive officer. Donnie Perkins is our chief diversity officer and does an excellent job in the role. However, it’s also important to note that we have a very close working relationship with Elliott Kellman, who is our chief human resources officer, because so much of what we do in workforce planning and workforce development is structured around the importance of diversity at every level in our organization.

In our organization, we selected the top 24 people from within our health system to be part of an education-and-training program in conjunction with Case Western Reserve School of Business. We’ve engaged 13 physicians and 11 non-physicians who were at senior levels in our organization who we feel have the potential to grow and develop in the years to come within University Hospitals’ health system. They were selected on the basis of their accomplishment. They were selected on the basis of diversity. They were selected on the basis of their ability to grow and develop within our organization. It’s an 18-month program, but we’ve seen great success thus far. One of those individuals has already been promoted to a new senior position that was recently created in our organization.

But at the other end of the spectrum, we’re also concerned that we don’t have enough people of color in our management ranks. So we put together a mentorship program, which will include people at the senior administrative level who will choose people who have promotional capability within our organization, who will be working with each of us to make sure that they will be given the opportunity to grow and develop within our organization in both non-management as well as in management roles, so that we can encourage more people of color to get actively engaged as supervisors, managers, directors, vice presidents.

Visconti: How are you holding your senior team accountable for diversity-and-inclusion results?

Zenty: Our senior team is very actively engaged with Donnie’s leadership in making certain that we are focused on diversity at every level within our organization, looking at the healthcare needs of the people who we serve, making certain that our employees are given equal opportunity for promotion and growth within our health system, making certain that people who are in middle management have opportunities to grow into senior-management roles, and making certain that we are focused on doing everything that we can to prepare the next generation of leader who will be people of color and of diverse backgrounds. Likewise, it’s important to mention that our board has been focused on diversity over the past many years. And I’m pleased to report that the Council on Economic Inclusion has awarded us for two years in a row recognition for the diversity of our board. If we receive it a third year in a row, we’ll go into the Hall of Fame, and we’re hoping that that will be achieved. This actually starts at the top, beginning with our board, and then filters throughout our entire organization.

Visconti: What do you see as the greatest challenge facing University Hospitals? And how does diversity and inclusion factor into the solution?

Zenty: The greatest challenge will be how to address the changes that we’ll be facing under healthcare reform. One of the key things that we will focus on in the area of diversity is to make certain that the 32 million more Americans who will now have access to healthcare insurance that didn’t have it before, that they will be well represented both within the communities that we serve as well as well represented in the patient populations that we care for. We have a number of very strong specialty clinics that will focus on the needs of specific elements within our population. But we want to make certain that as we see this influx of new patients arriving, we clearly understand what their needs will be—which is more than just episodic acute-care needs, but the continuum of care of services that we’ll be able to provide to them in the years to come.

Visconti: I found University Hospitals’ website to be exemplary in its ability to communicate your mission, your values, how diversity ties into all of this, your corporate citizenship, your engagement with the community. Why is it so important to communicate this?

Zenty: University Hospitals really wants to be a leader in the area of diversity. We’ve been in existence since 1866. We’ve been a very active and vibrant part of this community for that same period of time. And we want to make certain that we’re going to be leaders in the area of diversity—to set the example, to set the tone toward diligently making great things happen in the world of diversity, and to make certain that we’re going to focus not only on the needs of our patients, but also on the needs of those within our organization, to make certain that everyone will be able to realize their fullest potential.

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