Resources Mentioned in Today's Episode

• Health Affairs Article: Inequity: Society’s Most Important Pre-Existing Condition
• Health Affairs Article: Inequities Amplified By COVID-19: Opportunities For Medicaid To Address Health Disparities

Key Takeaways

Cincinnati Children's Community Outreach

• We're trying to not only identify where the disparities are, but also get beyond just describing them.
  • We're trying to figure out what pathways are creating them and who are high-leverage partners in the community to address this.
• We've worked to take our quality improvement work from inside the hospital and bring it out into the community to help guide our partnerships and work collectively with multiple institutions to address child health disparities.
  • Whatever we redesign must be consonant with their issues around trust and value.

The Importance of Trust Right Now  

• We work closely with our partners in community relations because it's critical in building sustained dialogue directly with our communities.  
• It's important to bring families directly into our planning circles and execution circles in order to guid us along the way.
• Delivering results is the most crucial aspect of building trust.

The Disproportionate Effect on Vulnerable Communities  

• Mortality and case rates are roughly double in minority communities.
  • Potentially because a segment is at increased risk or there's diminished access to effective treatment.  
• The day we get a highly effective vaccine, the greater the opportunity for huge disparities to arise.
• There's an increased risk of exposure in the occupations they have, less ability to stay home and protect oneself, and less access to protective equipment.  
• Additionally, access to testing is increasingly looming as a challenge for prisons, domestic violence shelters, and dense housing complexes.  

The Importance of Communicating to All Communities

• There's right content, myths, and messages to get out to the right spokespeople.
• You then have to decide what format and distribution channels will help you reach these diverse audiences in your region.
• To help, you should partner with community influential community members.

The Diversity of the Cincinnati Community

• 40% to 50% are African American.
• 30% to 40% are white.  
• 5% to 10% are Latino (rapidly growing).

Effective Ways to Reach Disadvantaged Communities

• Food insecurity is a tough topic for most institutions, so it's assumed that many cities face lost jobs and food insecurity.  
• The Cincinnati public schools quickly opened up 24 meal delivery sites, and we have a standing relationship with the public schools around their education work. We partnered with them around those sites and focused on:
  • How do we let them be the infrastructure in a platform around food, but how do we partner with them and bring health information into that space and then not just health information.

Common Obstacles

• One risk of engaging in the food insecurity space would be the failure to communicate your purpose correctly.  
• As you try to work in a vulnerable neighborhood, you should find out who the internal stakeholders are and who needs to be engaged.

Advice for Marketing and Communications Leaders

• I think it's an excellent opportunity for us to engage our communications experts with people at the furthest reaches of the front lines and harvest or crowdsource the problems we're seeing.  
• You want to make sure you're hearing from front-line innovators as well and see if you can get them involved.  
• Don't let this fall off your radar  
  • This type of work is an opportunity to build for the next 10 years.
  • The value premise, as many of us are shifting from volume to value-based payment, is keeping families healthy. It's all the more reason to make this upfront investment now in addressing health disparities and communicating well.

The Focus on Inequity and Vulnerable Communities at Cincinnati Children's  

• Our CEO and our board chair not only care passionately about the issue, but they also take time to work with internal communications to make sure that that message gets out internally.
• Getting other hospital leaders to understand that about 25% of our population is well below the mean can help get them on your side and buy into the strategies and efforts you're putting in place.