Health Equity by Design
With our purpose to improve the health of humanity, we know that we must commit to advancing health equity on an individual and an industry level.
That means making sure everyone has a fair opportunity to be as healthy as possible, regardless of age, race, gender, disability, socioeconomic status, or other circumstance.
Our approach, known as "health equity by design," is tailored to optimize health at the individual level, prioritize related efforts and investments, and elevate marginalized consumers and communities. It also drives us to share best practices across the industry and partner with care providers to enable and incentivize equitable care.
Health Equity by Design Framework: Identify and scale best practices for health outcome improvement and social care models; Expand and standardize the collection, analysis, and reporting of consumer data; Enhance care provider capacity, incentives, and accountability to deliver on health equity; cultivate and sustain an enterprise culture of health equity and social care models.
We've prioritized three areas of the framework to drive immediate progress: maternal health, behavioral health, and access to evidence-based medical therapy. Equity issues in these areas became especially apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, in turn, guiding our approach toward partnerships and operational design to drive results.
Empowering Care Providers
As part of our commitment to health equity, we're focused on giving care providers the resources they need to close care gaps and deliver more equitable treatment. One way we do that is by providing them with a repository of health equity resources and trainings on mydiversepatients.com.
The site contains a continuously expanding catalog of continuing medical education (CME) trainings to help care providers support the unique needs of diverse patients. They're available at no charge to all care providers, regardless of whether or not they participate in one of our affiliated health plans' networks.
43k users have visited the site since its 2017 launch1
30 countries' care providers use the site to improve health equity1
11 educational articles have been added within the past year1
Popular CME courses to date include:1
- My Inclusive Practice: Improving Care for LGBTQIA+ Patients: ~30,000 e-learners
- Improving the Patient Experience: ~7,000 e-learners
- Moving Toward Equity in Asthma Care: ~4,000 e-learners
We also recently began offering implicit bias training for our obstetric care provider partners through a partnership with March of Dimes. By the end of 2023, more than 400 care providers had completed the training.2
In Q2 2023, our obstetric practice consultant partners reported a 13% reduction in neonatal intensive care unit admissions, compared to the previous year.3
Advancing Health Equity, Together
In 2022, 21 of our affiliated Medicaid plans were among the first in the nation to earn a full three-year accreditation for health equity from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).4
This accreditation reflects our commitment to addressing the whole-health needs of communities of historically marginalized people.
In 2023, we expanded our race, ethnicity, and language data policy to meet critical requirements for NCQA accreditation.
- To date, it's allowed us to capture direct-attested race and ethnicity data on more than 53% of our consumers — an increase of about 8% from December 2022.5
- In California, it helped us improve HbA1c control in Hispanic and Latinx consumers with diabetes.6
1 Google analytics data (December 2023). 2 Care provider registration data (2023). 3 Elevance Health, internal data (October 2023). 4 Elevance Health press release, Twenty-one Elevance Health Medicaid Plans Receive NCQA Health Equity Accreditation (November 28, 2022). 5 Elevance Health, internal data (December 2023). 6 Elevance Health, Covered California Disparity Reduction Project data (October 2023).