Children's Hospitals Today - Winter 2023 - 30

VITALS 5 MINUTES WITH...
Measuring DEI efforts
Children's hospital leaders share how they are measuring
initiatives that can be hard to quantify.
BY GREYSON HONAKER
M
ost hospital outcomes are easy
to measure: you x-ray a healed
bone, you calculate discharge rates,
you test blood in a lab. But how do you
know whether your entire organization
and the care you provide is more
equitable and inclusive? Are there tools
for measuring? Are there goals that can
be quantified? Three children's hospital
leaders, who serve on the Children's
Hospital Association's Diversity, Equity
and Inclusion (DEI) Advisory Group,
share ways their organizations measure
the effect of DEI initiatives and
stay accountable to their mission.
How is your organization measuring
the effect of DEI initiatives?
Goepferd: At Children's Minnesota,
measuring and assessing happens in
many forms. There are quantitative
measures, such as our Health Equity index,
that directly measure the clinical
initiatives designed to address health
disparities and inequitable gaps in
care outcomes. There are qualitative
outcomes, such as representation in
our marketing, media and educational
programming, that reflect our values
and initiatives in the DEI space. Other
quantitative measures include hire, retention
and promotion rates of diverse
employees, organizational engagement
scores relative to DEI initiatives,
better capturing of Race, Ethnicity
and Language (REaL) data for both
employee and patient information,
engagement numbers of employees
with employment resource groups,
and individual impact scores such as
Intercultural Development Inventory
(IDI) assessments.
30
CHILDREN'S HOSPITALS TODAY Winter 2023
Denice Cora-Bramble,
M.D., MBA, chief diversity
officer, Children's
National Hospital
Angela Kade Goepferd,
M.D., chief education
officer, Childrenʼs
Minnesota
Lourdes Negrón-McDaniel,
director of Inclusion and
Culture, Nationwide
Children's Hospital
Cora-Bramble: The DEI program from
Children's National Hospital is driven
by data, which we collect and analyze
in at least three different ways: a
Diversity Engagement Survey, which
provided a baseline assessment to
identify strengths and areas for improvement;
patient health equity data
to ensure equity in the delivery of
health care services to all patients; and
submissions to our employee bias reporting
system, an online confidential
system where employees may report incidents
where a person exhibits biased
words, actions or behaviors. We also
plan to measure the effect of a quality
improvement initiative centered on patient
health equity. Lastly, bias reports
are tracked and individually addressed
on an ongoing basis.
Negrón-McDaniel: The decades of work
we've done serve as the foundation of
our current Stand Against Racism,
Stand for Health Equity framework,
which tracks efforts across seven pillars.
Our board-approved overarching
goal is to embrace the differences
and uniqueness of each individual
to eliminate racism and ensure
optimal health care for all. Across
Nationwide Children's Hospital,
quality
improvement
projects
are
beginning to stratify data by race,
ethnicity, language and/or geography.
As our institution strives for health
equity, data analyses and visualizations
are critical in identifying, understanding
and communicating disparities
in health outcomes. With this in
mind, we created an institution-wide
health equity dashboard as a central
source of information about population
health outcomes and the process
outcomes achieved.
How is your organization tracking
progress enterprise-wide?
Goepferd: In patient care, Children's
Minnesota has created a health equity
dashboard to measure gaps that have
great impact on our patient families. In
supplier diversity, we have annual goals
focused on identifying diverse businesses
and creating opportunities for
those companies to work with us. For
workforce, we have diversity measures
woven throughout for greater visibility
of outcomes. Some of the data assessed
includes turnover, engagement
survey results, vacancy rates, FTE to
budget, and skills gap assessments. In
addition, the HR team assesses the effect
of talent management practices on
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