Publications

The California Improvement Network (CIN) is a community of health care professionals committed to identifying and spreading ideas for better primary care delivery. This issue of CIN Connections offers ways to implement quality improvement efforts that intentionally advance health equity in primary care. It summarizes strategies and reflections from national leaders at the CIN partners meeting in November 2021 as they wrestle with addressing health disparities:

• Dr. Cameron Webb, senior policy advisor for equity for the White House COVID-19 Response Team, on three national lessons to advance racial health equity
• Dr. Michelle-Marie Peña, from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, shared a tool for equity-focused quality improvement
• Dr. Ron Wyatt, vice president and patient safety officer at MCIC Vermont, discussed how to build a measurement system to improve equitable care
• Dr. Ritchie Rubio of the San Francisco Department of Public Health shared strategies for narrowing disparities in behavioral health through racial and cultural concordance

In the opening column, CIN Managing Partner Nicole Howard reflects: "I had not considered how my work, while yielding improvements for many patients, might widen disparities among populations that have been systematically marginalized.... I hope that you will find the learnings impactful and will join me in embracing this long-overdue evolution of quality improvement.... It is troubling to think that some of our QI work to date has perpetuated these systemic biases."

Other resources from the November CIN partners meeting are recordings of all speaker presentations and a page of related resources.

The California Improvement Network (CIN) is a project of the California Health Care Foundation and is managed by Healthforce Center at UCSF.

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