How Should Health Professions Educators and Organizations Desegregate Teaching and Learning Environments?

Motivating health equity requires taking deliberate steps toward desegregating health care, especially in academic health centers. One step should incorporate rigorous measurement and assessment of patients' access to health services and ongoing collection and review of patients' health outcomes data. Another step should develop, fund, incorporate and administer initiatives with community members that address social determinants of community and individual health, including academic health centers' inpatient and outpatient service delivery sites, insurance programs, and federal policy. Academic health centers must also be accountable for monitoring initiatives' successes and failures over short- and long-term trajectories and for modifying initiatives' methods as needed to achieve equity in access to health services and health outcomes.