Theme | Implications for Action |
---|---|
Education | Incorporate advocacy, community organizing, and relational leadership skills into medical education to enable future health professionals to partner with communities to create social change. |
Change admission policies for health professional institutions to prioritize recruiting individuals from underrepresented populations and communities of need. | |
Improve didactic exposure to vulnerable groups in health professional education and provide in-person experiences with these populations. | |
Clinical practice | Use validated screening tools to identify SDHs and social needs. |
Create data-enabled teams and workflows to identify and address SDHs in the context of the clinical setting. | |
Develop roles in team-based primary care that include creating meaningful partnerships with community members and organizations (eg, community health workers, community organizers). | |
Examine each clinical encounter from the perspective of systemic injustice or structural violence. | |
Research | Partner with clinicians to develop and validate SDH screening tools; partner with educators to develop and measure effectiveness of health equity curricular elements. |
Focus on implementation science research that highlights characteristics of feasible, replicable interventions that identify and address SDHs at the clinical level. | |
Develop and validate new metrics that gauge the impact of health equity interventions, with a focus on implementing patient-centered outcomes (eg, self-efficacy, social connectedness, quality of life). | |
Engage in research focused on integration of individual-level SDH data with population and public health outcomes. | |
Policy and advocacy | Invest in community partnerships and health information technology to develop workflows that improve data sharing between primary care, public health, and local social services. |
Partner with patients and use their stories to advocate for policy change that positively affects SDHs and their effects on health care. | |
Ensure that all institutional and policy decisions include an equity lens. | |
Advocate for alternative payment models that enable primary care delivery to integrate social services and community partnerships, such as individual- and community-level risk adjustments for SDHs. |
SDH, social determinant of health.