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A Playbook for C-Suite Alignment on Health Equity

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Related Topics:
Health EquityWorkforce
Relevant Roles:
Chief Operation OfficersChief Strategy Officers Chief Physician ExecutivesChief Health Equity Officers

Health equity is a recognized strategic goal across all C-Suite leaders, with CHROs, CFOs, and CSOs naming it among their top 10 priorities across 2024. But every leader has to navigate pursuing health equity goals in addition to other obligations—which means equity efforts often end up falling by the wayside.

These efforts don't have to be siloed. Rather, champions for health equity can use these other priorities as an opportunity. Indeed, our Health Equity Alliance (HEA) team has found that health equity champions (including those in dedicated roles as well as those passionate about the issue in roles across systems) can achieve greater impact by intentionally aligning health equity initiatives with their colleagues’ broader goals. Making champions’ initiatives valuable to your colleagues drives greater potential for impact and action.

How Demonstrating Value Drives Stronger Collaboration

To demonstrate the value of your health equity goal to other C-Suite decisionmakers, our HEA team suggests sitting down to do some careful mapping. How could a health equity initiative or investment address your colleagues’ organizational needs or impact their ability to execute on strategic priorities? Answering these questions requires having a pulse on the evolving priorities of each CXO persona and understanding where they’re being held accountable to deliver value.

The HEA team has a full playbook on doing this mapping which we’ve excerpted some of below.

October 9th Edition (for rich text)
CSOs: Planning for the Future of the System

Regardless of the growth paths your system is pursuing, it is critical to build a relationship with the system CSO. The CSO will have direct insight into decision-making around system strategic goals, can verify the alignment of your health equity strategy with the larger system strategy, and help effectively position health equity as an enabler of larger strategic goals.

  • How Your Health Equity Goal Can be Valuable for CSOs:

    Identify how your health equity initiative maps into the strategic plan. One example is identifying how your goal supports retaining long-term patient loyalty by minimizing avoidable direct costs that are tied to health disparities among patients in high-growth demographic groups in high-need ZIP codes.

CHROs: Cultivating the Current & Future Workforce

Internal education and communication are key mechanisms to advancing a culture of equity. To that end, it is critical to be in lockstep with your CHRO and/or Chief Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Officer who have direct insight around broader workforce education and training needs. Building a partnership with the CHRO ensures that the communication and training cadence for health equity is strategically positioned among other scheduled enterprise-level workforce communications or trainings.

  • How Your Health Equity Goal Can be Valuable for CHROs: Identify how your efforts can strengthen the health system’s internal brand reputation. What impact will it have on improving employee engagement, job satisfaction, retention, turnover, and/or leadership development?

COOs: Enabling System Objectives Across the Enterprise

COOs provide operational leadership and management across a wide scope to ensure the health system performs well. They are stewards of cost management within the organization and often operate behind the scenes.

  • How Your Health Equity Goal Can be Valuable for COOs: Translate the value of health equity through a nuanced understanding of priorities and pain points around operational efficiency. For example, highlight how through system-wide operational alignment on access to interpreters for patients with limited English proficiency (LEP) would translate into reduced length of stay.

CPEs: Furthering Clinical, Workforce, and Care Quality

The CPE role has evolved from a sole focus on medical staff and garnering physician buy-in to a strategic role that contributes to oversight of system and service line integration. Convey the impact of health equity investments on workforce and leadership in conversations with your CPE.

  • How Your Health Equity Goal Can be Valuable for CPEs: Provide CPEs a clear understanding of how timely interventions for high-risk patient populations will create opportunities to avoid costly complications arising from chronic conditions (e.g., diabetic amputations).

CQO: Enabling a Culture of Continuous Improvement

The Chief Quality Officer (CQO) is a key partner for reshaping existing policies, processes, and planning activities to fully embed an equity lens. CQOs provide operational and strategic leadership and oversight around quality and safety, so it’s important to understand the KPIs that are being used to track quality/safety goals and the accountability structure associated with those KPIs.

  • How Your Health Equity Goal Can be Valuable for CQOs: Outline how your health equity goals can translate into clinical quality gains. One example is showing your CQO data on how colorectal cancer screening rates improved after implementing a targeted, culturally relevant intervention for a given demographic group that is experiencing a disparity.

The Health Equity Alliance gives C-suite leaders insight and guidance on how to advance their health equity goals. Click here to learn more about the Health Equity Alliance.