Calling equity of care “a central parameter of quality of care,” the American Hospital Association's immediate past board Chairman Richard de Filippi appealed to the healthcare executives gathered at a diversity breakfast at the 2011 ACHE Congress on Healthcare Leadership in Chicago to redouble their efforts to engage the communities their organizations serve in an effort to reduce healthcare disparities and promote better patient outcomes.

That starts with making community involvement a priority at the healthcare organization's executive level—and working to ensure that the membership of the executive board reflects the community, said de Filippi, who also is a trustee with the Cambridge (Mass.) Health Alliance.

“If we don't already have a board that's a reasonable representative of the community, we're going to have a hard time” optimally serving that community, he said.

This summer, a collaboration that includes the AHA and the ACHE is expected to introduce a new set of diversity- and disparity-related objectives for healthcare organizations, de Filippi said. “The goals that we have for this are quantitative and time-related,” he added.

And although the details of some of the objectives still are being worked out, de Filippi said, one of the initiative's goals will be for every hospital to have a cultural competency training program.

Working to better understand the healthcare needs of a particular community—in particular with regard to patient education and preventive care—will be an integral part of health reform, he said. “One of the great things that's going to come out of the Affordable Care Act is a total change in our business model,” de Filippi said. “Now, we're going to own patients.” And given a flat amount of money for a patient's care, it will be up to providers to do everything they can to optimize that patient's outcome.

A transformation in the provider payment model will create a business imperative for healthcare organizations to address disparities in outcomes and demonstrate diversity in their leadership, de Filippi asserted. “We have industries that are investor-owned that are doing better than we are in terms of leadership diversity,” he said. “We're looking for a surge of progress.”

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