3rd Annual SDoH & Health Equity Congress

7:15am – 8:00am
Conference Registration & Networking Breakfast 

8:00am – 8:15am
Chairperson’s Opening Remarks 

8:15am – 9:00am
The Future of Nursing: Social Determinants of Health and Health Equity
Health equity cannot be achieved without nurses; their contribution is central to the delivery of healthcare. Nurses can improve outcomes for the underserved and can work to address the structural and institutional factors that produce health disparities. Nurses can use their interdisciplinary expertise and holistic approach to help develop and advocate for policies and programs that promote health equity. This session will explore why the role of nurses must focus on social determinants of health and health equity in the next decade and why they must be prioritized. 

9:00am – 9:45am
Striving for Health Equity: Strategies for Reducing Health Disparities
Reducing health disparities brings us closer to reaching health equity. This session will explore how healthcare professionals can enhance the impact of strategies for reducing health disparities, disseminate and tailor these strategies to reach more communities, and expand these strategies for even greater impact by rigorously applying lessons learned from these efforts. Topics to be discussed will include:

– Raising awareness among healthcare providers

– Increasing health literacy in affected communities

– Community partnerships

– Providing greater healthcare resources

9:45am – 10:15am
Networking & Refreshments Break 

10:15am – 11:15am
Panel: Advancing Health Equity by Addressing Social Determinants of Health
Social determinants of health have a greater impact on population health than factors like biology, behavior, and healthcare. SDOH, especially poverty, structural racism, and discrimination, are the primary drivers of health inequities. Reducing health inequities is important because they are pervasive, unfair and unjust; individuals affected have little control over the contributing circumstances; they affect everyone; and they can be avoided with existing policy solutions. This session will explore prevalent health inequities; describe how social factors impact health; discuss the role family physicians can play in addressing SDOH and reducing health inequities; and relevant policy interventions.

11:15am – 12:00pm
Involving Community Partners to Advance Health Equity
Communities across the U.S. face an array of complex health equity challenges, including meeting the health care needs of people experiencing homelessness, reducing poverty, and improving care for rural populations. Addressing these issues requires robust collaboration and cross-sector data sharing to better understand how community members access health care. While states and community-based organizations (CBOs) have developed data sharing and policy initiatives across sectors, community members are often not included in these efforts. This panel discussion explored how state agencies, CBOs, and community members can partner to advance health equity through data sharing and policy reform activities. 

12:00pm – 1:00pm
Luncheon 

1:00pm – 1:45pm
Leadership Development Strategies to Advance Health Equity
Enduring questions about equity are front and center in healthcare. Inequities that became evident in the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 have highlighted long-standing disparities in health by race and ethnicity. Current crises require examining and reorienting the systems that have, for decades, produced these health inequities; yet public health and healthcare leaders are inadequately prepared to respond. This session will explore an equity-centered leadership framework to support the development of visionary leaders for tomorrow. Learn how to equip leaders with the mindset and skill set to challenge the paradigms that lead to inequity and health disparities.

1:45pm – 2:45pm
Panel: Launching a Meaningful Health Equity and Social Determinants of Health Strategy
Addressing SDOH and health equity in a community can seem like an insurmountable task. A patient’s SDOH contribute more to their health than the medical care they receive or their genetic code. Increasingly, the healthcare industry has begun to understand how these factors influence health outcomes and focus on preventive strategies that improve SDOH and health equity. This session will explore strategies to address SDOH needs within patient populations and improve health equity. Topics to be discussed will include:

– Promoting buy-in at all levels

– Drawing data from multiple sources

– Encouraging community involvement

2:45pm – 3:15pm
Networking & Refreshments Break 

3:15pm – 4:00pm
Ensuring Health Equity for LGBT Patients
The LGBT community is diverse. While L, G, B and T are usually tied together as an acronym that suggests homogeneity, each letter represents a wide range of people of different races, ethnicities, ages, socioeconomic status and identities. What binds them together as social and gender minorities are common experiences of stigma and discrimination, the struggle of living at the intersection of many cultural backgrounds and trying to be a part of each, and, specifically with respect to health are, a long history of discrimination and lack of awareness of health needs by health professionals. As a result, LGBT people face a common set of challenges in accessing culturally competent healthcare services and achieving the highest possible level of care. This session will explore LGBT concepts, terminology and demographics; discuss health disparities affecting LGBT groups; and outline steps clinicians and health care organizations can take to provide access to patient-centered care for their LGBT patients.

4:00pm – 4:45pm
Why Social Determinants of Health Should Matter to Employers
With hundreds of billions in lost productivity due to health-related problems, and billions spent on chronic diseases and unhealthy behaviors by employers every year, tackling the non-medical factors influencing your employees’ health is critical. Employees don’t leave SDOH at the door, they bring them to work every day. For companies, this can result in both absenteeism (missing work due to poor health) and presenteeism (decrease in performance and productivity at work due to poor health), not to mention workforce-wide effects on productivity, satisfaction, and general wellbeing. This session will explore how to tackle SDOH in your employee population and understanding the societal forces within it 

4:45pm – 5:30pm
How to Create Behavioral Health Equity
This session will examine programs that health plans are putting into place to positively impact health outcomes and the quality and cost of care of some of the highest utilizers. Topics to be discussed will include:

• Connecting members to critical services
• How to improve screening and interventions
• How to improve resource utilization
• The impact of social determinant programs on member health and cost of care
• Ways to reduce disparities in health outcomes

5:30pm
End of Day One

7:15am – 8:00am
Networking Breakfast 

8:00am – 8:15am
Chairperson’s Recap 

8:15am – 9:00am

8:15am – 9:00am
How the Supply Chain Meets the Demand for Health Equity
The COVID-19 pandemic heightened the world’s awareness of the strategic importance of the healthcare supply chain, perhaps more than any other event in history. Just as supply chain professionals collaborate today with clinicians to identify the best products to use in clinical care, so, too, can supply chain work with public health experts and community resources to optimize population health and minimize health disparities. This session will explore key determinants for resilient healthcare supply chains, and how organizational commitment and wise spending can ensure healthcare supply chain resilience. 

9:00am – 9:45am
Health Equity and Social Determinants of Health in Pediatrics: Balancing Mission and Financial Sustainability
With increasing recognition of the impact of poverty, racism and other social factors on child health, many pediatric health systems are undertaking interventions to address social determinants of health. Initiatives among mission-driven pediatric health systems to address social determinants of health are increasingly common despite funding challenges. Value-based payments, expansion of Medicaid funding resulting from policy changes and delivery system reform, along with health system philanthropy and operating revenues, will all be needed to meet mission-based goals of addressing social determinants of health while supporting financial sustainability. This session will explore these initiatives and recent developments in state and federal health policy impacting funding for these efforts.

9:45am – 10:15am
Networking & Refreshments Break 

10:15am – 11:15am
Panel: Payer Efforts to Improve Health Equity and Take Action on Social Determinants of Health
The significant challenge of comprehensively addressing social needs requires action, innovation and collaboration from a broad range of stakeholders, including public and private health care payers. Payers can be an important part of the solution by changing how they pay providers that treat patients with social needs and by partnering with social service organizations. Although it is difficult work, several payers have been at the forefront of designing and deploying policies that encourage healthcare providers to help address health-related social needs. This session will explore the broad range of strategies payers have employed and partnerships they have engaged to reduce social determinants of health barriers. Learn initiatives they have launched that aim to address social determinants of health factors and improve health equity.

11:15am – 12:00pm
Telehealth: Both a Digital Divide and a Means of Health Equity
Telehealth has been shown to have comparable health outcomes in terms of patient-physician communication, and patient satisfaction and engagement. Nevertheless, the digital divide has exacerbated the social and economic factors that create barriers to health and well-being. It, therefore, maybe a social determinant of health. Such issues as decreased internet connectivity and a lack of Wi-Fi and video chat/webcam in both urban and rural areas can hinder the effectiveness of telehealth to its full capability, especially among communities of color, the poor and medically underserved. On the contrary, telehealth has the potential to become an important tool to address longstanding health inequities in historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups. This session will explore the digital divide as a SDOH and how to strengthen existing healthcare and public health systems to allow for patient and community-centered approaches to care. Those developing and implementing telehealth solutions must make it a priority to partner with historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups to ensure that solutions are designed to be accessible and work well for all.

12:00pm – 1:00pm
Luncheon 

1:00pm – 1:45pm
The Business Case for Addressing Social Determinants of Health
Health and health care inequities—systemic, measurable and avoidable differences in health-related outcomes between populations—are increasing in the United States. Access to healthy food, reliable transportation, safe shelter, and quality education are a few of the social and economic forces—the social determinants of health that explain a significant proportion of these gaps in health and healthcare. Increasingly, payors have moved towards risk-adjusted models, including capitated, global and bundled payments; shared savings arrangements; and penalties for hospital readmissions that give health systems and practices economic incentives to incorporate social interventions into their approach to care. SDOH have a critical impact on key pay for performance indicators such as hospital-acquired conditions, readmissions, value-based purchasing programs and star ratings. Integrated hospital systems that include an insurance arm have the highest opportunity for ROI. Value-based contracts with Medicaid and Advantage plans through ACOs and hospital performance indicators are other important areas which have the potential for high returns for systems that do not have a payor as part of their integrated network. The latter requires precision in funding areas that have the highest impact and alignment with the community health needs assessments. This session will explore all this and more as it relates to the business case for addressing SDOH.

1:45pm – 2:45pm
How State Medicaid Plans are Addressing Social Drivers of Health to Reduce Health Disparities
With considerable evidence that interventions aimed at social drivers of health can positively influence costs and health outcomes, the discourse is changing among policy influencers and providers to look beyond clinical and disease conditions and address the environmental factors that impact our healthcare system. Medicaid enrollees with complex health needs and unmet social needs are at high risk of hospitalization, institutionalization, and other higher cost services. For example, people experiencing homelessness have higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, HIV, and mortality resulting in longer hospital stays and higher readmission rates than the general public. Addressing social drivers of health is key to advancing health equity and helping people with high healthcare and social needs. This session will explore how state Medicaid plans are addressing various social drives of health through enhanced care management and community support.

2:45pm – 3:30pm
Promoting Health Equity: Helping Communities Address Social Determinants of Health
It is well documented that individuals with serious mental illnesses are disadvantaged in their employment, educational attainment, social relationships, family relationships, and other areas, which are all social determinants of health. They are also the focus of community inclusion initiatives that are based in legal and human rights. This session will explore the community inclusion concept and the health-related outcomes that are expected to result from community inclusion efforts. Incorporating fundamentals and indicators of community inclusion into mental health systems offers a paradigm for addressing social determinants and improving health as part of the larger health care agenda.

3:30pm
Conference Concludes

3:30pm – 5:30pm

Workshop: Closing the Health Equity Gap

While many healthcare stakeholders strive to provide universal care and resources for all, inequity continues to run deep within the healthcare system. Whether your organization is in the early stages of developing a health equity strategy or currently taking action on key initiatives, learn how to help drive your health equity agenda. You will better understand how to drive measurable impacts to both health outcomes and business metrics. Topics to be discussed will include:

– Approaches to data management to enhance the patient experience

– Leveraging metrics to understand patients’ vulnerability to health disparities

– Driving greater access to quality healthcare for underserved communities

– Establishing and growing patient-centered care practices to improve outcomes and reduce health disparities