Inside Health Care #117: Live from NCQA's Second Health Innovation Summit

Quality Matters: A Podcast by NCQA

In this episode, we hear clips from four interviews recorded live at NCQA’s 2nd annual Health Innovation Summit.

Parker Holcomb is Chief AI Engineer at Elevance Health. At NCQA’s 2023 Health Innovation Summit, he participated in a session titled “Building Trust in Clinical Data for Value-Based Care”. Parker stands at the forefront of data quality, constantly seeking to perfect data quality standards, all towards closing gaps in health equity. So how do professionals and technologists align the movement toward digital health transformation in the direction of value-based care?

Dr. Joseph Betancourt is president of the Commonwealth Fund. One of the nation’s preeminent leaders in health care quality, Dr. Betancourt formerly served as senior vice president for Equity and Community Health at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), overseeing a number of entities including the Center for Diversity and Inclusion.

A prolific author, lecturer, and board-certified internist who focuses on Spanish-speaking and minority populations, Dr. Betancourt is also an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. This is notable for this interview, as he earned his MPH from Harvard with one of the first classes in the Commonwealth Fund–Harvard University Fellowship in Minority Health Policy.

At the 2023 NCQA Health Innovation Summit, he led a session titled “Pursuing the North Star: A high performing, equitable health care system”. And as you’ll hear, increasing diversity among health care professionals and rebuilding the trust of historically under-served patients are just two of a myriad of ingredients necessary to right the ship on the journey to Health Equity.

Next, we hear a success story from a team from WellSpan Health, a health care that found a gap in health care equity and nailed down a solid and sustainable solution.

Jenna Jansen is the Senior Director of Quality at WellSpan Health.

Jodi Cichetti is Vice President, Quality and Patient Safety, at Wellspan Health.

Jenna and Jodi presented a session at the Health Innovation Summit titled “STOP, Collaborate, & LISTEN! Improving equitable access to care”. In the interview, they told the story of how their research revealed a gap in care delivery. Using various analytical tools including NCQA’s breast cancer screening measure, part of our HEDIS set of measures, they discovered a disparity among Spanish-speaking patients.

Christopher J. King is the inaugural Dean of the School of Health and former Chair of the Department of Health Systems Administration at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. An academic administrator, associate professor, and strategist, who is board certified in healthcare, Dr. King’s writing and teaching focus on the intersection of institutional racism, social determinants of health, and healthcare administration. And he envisions a world in which health status cannot be predicted by race, social class or place of residence.

At this year’s NCQA Health Innovation Summit, Dr. King joined the dais in a session titled “No Quality without Equity”. In this clip from our interview, Dr. King talks about race-based clinical data in health care. And in his view, the use of this data is doing more harm than good.

Stay tuned for more information about NCQA’s next Health Innovation Summit, set for Nashville, October 31-November 2, 2024. For more, go to https://www.ncqasummit.com.