Last week, I was competing at the US Rowing Master’s National Championship in Sarasota, Florida. In this sport, there is a strong focus on diversity, as rowing is historically not very diverse. But as I participated, I noticed all the dimensions of diversity that are important to the well-being and thriving of any organization: age, gender, race, nationality, disability, geography. Rowing brings together all of these elements aligned to a love of the sport. Even if there is more work to be done to create programs that bring adult rowers from all communities to take up an oar, the intentionality of doing so is a vital step forward. The same is true in health care. An intentional focus and relentless commitment to action is vital to achieving representativeness at all levels of decision-making, in data, in research, and in delivery design.

Patient engagement in healthcare research is having a moment. Conferences, public policies, and thought leaders have finally begun to echo what so many of us have said for decades – patients, with all their rich complexities, must be at the center of healthcare research as full partners.

Precision medicine — tailoring a treatment to an individual’s disease — requires understanding the individual’s biological characteristics.

Congress should pass the proposed Pharmaceutical Research Transparency Act of 2022 to mandate drug companies provide detailed and disaggregated clinical trial costs to the public.

Social determinants of health (SDOH) are major drivers of the inequities seen in health outcomes, and racism is clearly a social determinant tied to life expectancy, said Karol Watson, MD, PhD, in talk Sunday at the 2022 Congress of the American Society for Preventive Cardiology, held in Louisville, Kentucky.

As companies selling health care apps struggle to prove to a skeptical system that they really deliver results, we’re about to start hearing a lot more about “engagement.”

The lack of diversity in clinical trials unfairly skews American medicine and costs billions of dollars a year in early deaths and poor health. Proven economic incentives to recruit more diverse participants can dramatically change the picture — if the will exists to employ them.

For two years, the Covid-19 pandemic rattled financial markets, dominated news coverage and disrupted daily life in ways most Americans would never have predicted.

But now, in year three, the coronavirus has been downgraded to a persistent yet manageable threat—on par with the flu.

Momentum Health Strategies

Jennifer L Bright, MPA

(703) 628 - 0534

jennifer@momentumhealthstrategies.com

www.momentumhealthstrategies.com

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