Building Racial Equity Into The Walls Of Health Policy

A new Health Affairs blog post authored by Dr. Nathan Chomilo, Medical Director for the State of Minnesota’s Medicaid program and a practicing pediatrician and an internal medicine hospitalist with Park Nicollet Health Services/HealthPartners, highlights how racial equity can be built into research and policy and why this is important step as states and policymakers seek to dismantle structure racism in the health care system. Dr. Chomilo notes several examples of how stakeholders can assess research and policy for racial equity at the start. These examples include requiring a racial equity assessment at the start of the development of research proposals aimed at answering policy questions to help ensure investigators have, at the very least, stopped to ask how their work may or may not contribute to structural racism or advance racial justice and improving and standardizing ways to collect race, ethnicity, and language demographic data for not only public payers such as Medicare and Medicaid but all health insurers, social safety-net programs, and education systems.