Transcription:
Health Equity and the Center for Health Equity Transformation (CHET)

Melanie Cole (Host): Welcome to Better Edge, a Northwestern Medicine podcast for physicians. I'm Melanie Cole and joining me today is Dr. Melissa Simon. She's Vice Chair of Research for the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern Medicine, as well as the Director of the Center for Health Equity Transformation at Northwestern Medicine.

Dr. Simon is joining me today to discuss the service and impact of the Center for Health Equity Transformation. Thank you so much, Dr. Simon for joining us. I'm fascinated by this. What a great initiative this is. Before we get into the center, can you tell us a little bit about how you define health equity? What does that even mean? And what impact does it have on our community?

Melissa Simon, MD, MPH (Guest): Thank you very much for having me today. I'm very excited to speak about my lifelong mission and my northstar, health equity and health justice. Health equity means giving patients the care they need when they need it. And really it means providing care that doesn't vary in quality because of what a person looks like or their gender or their ethnicity or their, where they're located or their socioeconomic status.

Health equity really is achieved when every person has the opportunity to attain their full health potential and that no person is disadvantaged from achieving this potential because of their social position or other socially determined circumstances.

Host: Wow. That's such a great initiative. Now tell us about the Center for Health Equity Transformation and your mission, the goal for this center.

Dr. Simon: So, this work really evolved over the last 16 years as a faculty member here at Northwestern Medicine and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. My Center for Health Equity Transformation launched in 2018. And it's a real joint center between the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University and the Institute for Public Health and Medicine.

And basically we aim to lift health for all by exposing root causes of health inequities, and really to serve as a nurturing hub, pushing boundaries in research, education, workforce development, and community engagement, all of that leads towards healthy impact that then really aims to improve health for everyone.

Host: Dr. Simon, how does the center aim to achieve these important initiatives you've been discussing? And how's the strategy different than other centers?

Dr. Simon: So, our center is hyper-focused on the northstar of health equity and health justice, and we aim to achieve our mission to lift for all by really producing high quality research pathways for training and workforce development, to increase the number of diverse persons entering healthcare workforce and science careers, and also to impact and work directly with communities in order to improve policies and practices in communities that are disproportionately impacted by health disparities.

Host: So interesting what you're doing, Dr. Simon. So, tell us about your team at CHET and how you collaborate with the community. Tell us a little bit about outreach and how you all work together.

Dr. Simon: I have one of the most diverse teams at Northwestern Medicine. I am so proud of them. They are amazing. Right now we have 16 full-time staff on my team and multiple students, trainees and fellows, along with many community members across the Chicagoland area. And we all work together so well, and we are like a tight knit family that is all hyper-focused on improving all kinds of health inequities across the Chicagoland area.

Host: So, tell us about research that you've been involved in and how it's really contributed to medicine, because I think one of the things that makes this such an amazing initiative, Dr. Simon, that you're doing here, is that it's showing other providers about this type of outreach and how possible it really is. Tell us how you feel that you've contributed to medicine and any research you want to mention.

Dr. Simon: For sure. Our approach to research, which is community engaged. So, we always have a variety of people sitting at the table and not just sitting there, but actually vocalizing their community's needs in real time and helping to develop research questions, the research design and protocol, and to help review and collect the data and actually analyze it with us and disseminate it and publish it with us.

Some of the more relevant research is really around implementation science and health services delivery. So, for example, we have a very long standing track record of working on patient navigation research in both cancer care delivery and perinatal care. We also have a lot of work around health care quality and process improvement at a variety of health care centers across the city.

So, not just at Northwestern Medicine, our work impacts many of the federally qualified health centers and community health centers and community hospitals across the area. For example, we've done a lot of work in partnership with many other community organizations and institutions around breast cancer disparity. Over the last 15 to 16 years, we have worked on closing the gap in black versus white women's breast cancer mortality rates in Chicago, and we've been able to substantially reduce them from a gap of about 62% back in 2007 to under 40%. So, around 37% difference now in black versus white mortality in breast cancer for women in the Chicagoland area. And while that's still not a good number, it is much better than it was. But that takes a lot of people on all hands on deck, really working hard at the northstar or goal of eliminating breast cancer disparities in Chicago. And that includes patient navigation services. It includes improving quality care across the entire Chicagoland area. It shouldn't matter where you live or what your zip code is to dictate what kind of care you receive. It shouldn't matter where you live or what your zip code is to dictate your mortality or what age you're going to die at. It's just not right or fair. And that's the type of work that we aim to do.

Host: Here Here. Wow. Beautifully said. Now tell us about the Health for All Initiative. What's that?

Dr. Simon: Health for All Initiative is highly innovative and I'm very proud of it. Over the last several years with the wonderful funding from the National Institutes of Health National Library of Medicine, we've partnered with the Chicago public libraries across the city, and we have created Health for All Platform.

And basically, what that does, is it provides resources around participation in clinical trials from a patient's perspective. We've trained librarians on how to access clinical trials.gov. We've trained librarians around how to use these resources. There are lots of different videos and vignettes that are easy to use and easy to understand, that have been tested in many different cultures and populations across the country.

And this resource is just free and available for everyone. The other part of this now, that we're innovating in is around navigating wellness. So, navigating wellness is meant to help people know preventive services they need at their particular stage in life and to help connect them to preventive care.

And that's super important right now, given the COVID pandemic when people are, you know, not necessarily engaged in their healthcare over the last 18 months because of the pandemic. And so this gives them an opportunity to figure out well, where can they go get a preventive service, you know, a healthcare, a routine well-person checkup? What do they need to receive with respect to screening tests in order to ensure that they are healthy and get the care that they need?

And then finally, we're building out some maternity health care modules within that navigating wellness to really help pregnant and birthing persons learn more about you know, through podcasts, learn more about what they need during their pregnancy journey and their postpartum period.

So, all of these resources will be made free and available to the public. And I'm very proud of them because health education is so important, especially with respect to accurate information. Right now we're not only in a COVID pandemic, but we're in a pandemic of misinformation and it is essential that physicians and scientists like myself are able to provide free, accessible, easy to understand information that helps all people get the care they need and get the information they need to help their health.

Host: Well, we certainly are. And I can hear the passion for what you do in your voice, Dr. Simon. Really it's inspiring. Now, in addition, this is for other providers, they want to know about, you know, your research and program development, but also you're providing health disparities research training to minority and other underrepresented students.

You talked about your diverse staff. Tell us more about this and the importance of training the next generation to think like you do, because that is a little bit of the issue from back however long ago, that this was not a popular opinion that you are talking about here today, but you're really bringing it to the forefront with really, the experts at Northwestern Medicine.

Dr. Simon: Yeah, training the next generation is so important and it is critical given our evolving demography to majority minority over the next few decades in the United States of America. It is critical to have diverse scientists and physicians and healthcare team members in order to ensure all of our population members actually receive the healthcare that they deserve.

And it is, one of my most proud moments to be able to create pathways and opportunities and programs, to be able to avail opportunities for diverse students from across the Chicagoland area, for diverse trainees and faculty. It's critical and some of our programs for example, our Chicago Cancer Health Equity Scholars Program, trains 20 to 30 diverse college students from underrepresented backgrounds from across the city every year. And then they go on to learn in individual laboratory experiences. So, that helps foster their scientific development further and also their pathways towards becoming a healthcare provider and a scientist.

Host: As we wrap up, how do you see CHET growing in the future? And what would you like other providers to know about this important work that you're doing Dr. Simon and the importance of health equity across racial and gender lines so that everyone receives the healthcare that we all deserve.

Dr. Simon: Thank you for that question, such an important one. You know, CHET can grow in so many different ways. We're constrained obviously by resources and funding. So, whatever more grants that we can get, we'll be able to expand our programs. Obviously philanthropy always helps, but there's so many more things that we can do, but we are bounded by resources and ability to expand. So, we're always looking for partners and opportunities to increase our resources, to be able to expand our footprint and impact even more than what we've already done. I think that Northwestern physician providers and healthcare team members and providers from across the country have opportunities to really improve health equity in so many different ways.

And I look forward to hearing from healthcare providers and scientists and partnering with anyone really, who has a great idea or has a challenge that they'd like to talk about and to really think through the equity solution. Because again, there's just so much work to be done and so much opportunity, and I'm so thrilled to be able to have this privilege and platform that Northwestern Medicine and Northwestern University has provided for me through this center.

That I want everybody to know that we are available and we can be easily contacted through email. And we are willing to partner and make bigger impact in many different dimensions of health equity.

Host: So well said, Dr. Simon. What an informative and inspiring episode this was. Thank you so much for joining us and telling us about the Center for Health Equity Transformation at Northwestern Medicine. To refer your patient, or for more information, please visit our website at nm.org to get connected with one of our providers. That concludes this episode of Better Edge, a Northwestern Medicine podcast for physicians. Please, if you found this podcast informative, share on your social channels. I'm Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for listening.