About the Equity Conference

Hospitals and health systems, public health organizations, community service organizations, businesses and community members have long partnered on initiatives to improve community health and ultimately accelerate health equity. Co-designing community strategies is imperative to creating equitable community health strategies, and strong partnerships are a key ingredient to integrating the voice and lived experience of communities. Moving the needle in health equity requires cross-sector alignment to address societal factors and shared vision, coordination of data and resources, and meaningful and consistent engagement of community members at all stages.

Content submissions in this area should discuss innovative, replicable cross-sector partnership models and/or community engagement tactics that create opportunities to co-design, implement and evaluate strategies that address the societal factors that influence health and make improvements upstream.

Hospitals and health systems work in and with communities to improve health outcomes of patient populations by addressing medical and social needs. Doing so equitably requires practicing cultural humility and supporting activities that improve culturally-appropriate, person-centered care in partnership with communities and public health and social care providers.

Content submissions in this area should discuss innovative, replicable tactics to better understand and meet the medical and social needs of individuals. This includes successful screening for health-related social needs; data-driven interventions, partnerships and practices to meet individuals’ social needs; and more direct engagement of the community’s and individual’s priorities for health by incorporating individuals with lived experience into program development, implementation and evaluation.

As health systems and community organizations evolve and sustain their approach to health equity, diversity and inclusion, systematic and shared accountability with diverse leadership and governance is vital. Organizational infrastructure that supports shared accountability can include the presentation of policies and practices that incentivize sustaining equity within the health care system; integrating equity approaches in staff training and onboarding orientation; creating councils; designating equity champions; and including employees, patients and communities when setting strategies, priorities and key performance indicators. Meanwhile, diversifying leadership ranks requires taking intentional approaches to representing the populations and communities served. Sharing leadership talent pipeline strategies, approaches to board diversification and policies that promote diverse representation are welcome.

Content submissions in this area should share innovative, replicable tactics that generate policies and practices for positioning equity as a health system’s value. In addition, content that shares solutions to cultivating internal and community-based talent for leadership and board positions is welcome.

There are many paths to creating organizational climates and cultures that promote equitable and inclusive workplaces. Policies and practices that demonstrate the value of including multiple perspectives in the workplace are critical pathways to sustaining equity in health care. Approaches that integrate equity into the organizational culture of hospitals and health systems are welcome.

Content submissions in this area should discuss innovative, replicable tactics to create equitable and inclusive workplaces through organizational and community policies, talent cultivation, retention, recruitment efforts and more.

Along with the content areas above, we are particularly interested in sessions that highlight programs and initiatives with demonstrated success in the following areas:

• Community-based and/or clinical strategies to improve maternal health and reduce disparities in health outcomes for pregnant people and infants
• Differential impact of climate and the health system’s role
• Assuring equitable outcomes for the LGBTQIA+ population, persons with disabilities and aging populations.
• Partnerships with faith-based organizations from minority communities
• Community-based approaches to violence prevention

Choose this content area if your innovative idea, project or collaboration is relevant to the conference theme but does not fall into one of the above, specified content areas. Focus areas may include, but are not limited to, digital health equity, maternal and child health, behavioral health, gun violence prevention, and climate equity.