Stronger Together: Eliminating Racial Healthcare Inequities

Health equity remains an important emphasis throughout healthcare, including in laboratory medicine. But recognizing disparities in healthcare—and developing solutions to make sure that everyone has equal access to cutting-edge medicine—will only be realized if laboratorians play an active role.

The session, Stronger Together: Eliminating Racial Healthcare Inequities by Mitigating Systemic Racism, by Drs. Christina Pierre, Esa Davis, and Octavia Peck Palmer will focus on racism as a key driver of health inequities, specifically how structural racism influences social determinants of health that lead to poorer health and well-being in racial and ethnic minorities.

Pierre began her laboratory medicine career in her home country of Trinidad, where she identified screening gaps based on socioeconomic status. “It’s not so much that I chose this topic to present, it’s that it is a primary, core focus of the work that I do every day,” she said.

Social unrest in 2020 pushed issues of health equity to the forefront, and Pierre wants to keep pushing forward toward change. “The current social climate tells us why we need to keep paying attention to underprivileged populations, regardless of what identity that person has that makes them underserved or disadvantaged,” Pierre said.

The session will explore how laboratorians can equip themselves to deal with this complex health dilemma and provide foundational and up-to-date information to empower participants to identify the health impacts of structural racism. The speakers also will offer tools to mitigate these impacts and achieve health equity through laboratory medicine and clinical practice workflows.

The session also will present new recommendations from AACC and the National Kidney Foundation on improving equity in kidney disease. This is an important topic in health equity because early detection of kidney disease can lead to interventions that significantly slow down disease progress, Pierre said.

However, most early kidney disease detection happens in a primary care setting, and people who don’t have a primary care physician may be missed, she noted. “How do we ensure that we are optimizing healthcare across the board and not just for a particular group?”

For example, clinical laboratorians can play a role in examining how to use electronic health records to increase the uptake of screening or support physicians on utilizing kidney screening tests, she added.

Panelist Astor Davis is a member of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, and will speak to guidance aimed at mitigating systemic racism in guideline development and clinical preventative services. She will discuss how screening guidelines can be adopted to offer a national, unified approach to ensuring preventative testing and care for all. Peck Palmer will also be discussing how to develop a health equity program within both a clinical laboratory and medical institution.

Pierre believes that the panel will be of interest to medical professions across industries, including those working in patient care, clinical laboratory scientists, laboratory directors, and point-of-care coordinators. “My hope is that we can keep a central focus on health equity and make it a part of what we do in our day to day lives,” she said. “People often view health equity as a special mindset, topic, or area of study. But if we have identified groups of patients who have poorer outcomes, then we’re never going to achieve progress if we don’t address the contributing factors to those groups experiencing poorer health outcomes.”