Shiela Plasencia Highlights COA Health Equity Initiatives

Shiela Plasencia, director of practice support, Community Oncology Alliance (COA), addresses the importance of health equity at the COA Payer Exchange Summit while handling the challenges and barriers that follow.

Transcript

Can you speak to the COA health equity initiative that was discussed during the "How Are We Moving the Needle on Health Equity?" session at the COA Payer Exchange Summit?

Yeah, basically the title of 'How We're Moving the Needle on Health Equity' was just to really kind of align our focus on the work that we're doing and the impact that is actually reaching the patients. It just seems like there's been so much discussion around health equity and why it's important and what needs to be done. So I really wanted to spend some time focusing on some things done and the impact on the patient.

I hate to bring up just 1 specific example because there were several people on that stage but one that really stands out to me as impactful and again, there's numerous, but the work that was done at oncology consultants by Alti Rahman, [MHA, MBA, practice administrator, Oncology Consultants] and Susan Sabo-Wagner, [MSN, RN, OCN, NEA-BC, vice president of clinical innovation, American Oncology Network] where they really were able to identify that there were some inequities in their black and Vietnamese patient population.

They were able to look at creating a process and taking action to address those social determinants of health for those patient populations. They actually implemented a process where their [physicans' assistants] and nurse practitioners were reaching out to those patients. Taking that next best action and utilizing the healthy days tool as their ePROs [electronic patient-reported outcomes], they were able to see the change that the intervention made. They had a baseline of the ePRO tool and after the intervention of the ePRO tool. There was a substantial change and an impact to the patients so to be able to show that was pretty impressive.

I think that's the kind of stories we need to hear and be able to share with other independent community oncology practices because it's a big thing to bite off. Maybe starting in little pieces and little things that you can do, we'll eventually get there. So, I really, really, really liked that they did that. They were able to show, here's where we were and here's where we are now.

Among health care providers and institutions actively engaged in promoting health equity, what are the key barriers and challenges faced in implementing evidence-based practices?

It's amazing to me that we're so far out from when COVID-19 first hit and impacted everybody but it really did change things. One of the things we consistently continue to hear is, resources and staffing, that still is a difficult challenge for the practices and it does create a barrier to them achieving what they want to achieve as far as implementing health equity processes within their own organizations. If you don't have the resources to allocate to an initiative, it's really hard to get that up and running.

One of the other things that I think is a barrier is sometimes there is not necessarily a holistic approach to implementing health equity within the practice and having that leadership, so it doesn't necessarily come from the top down, might start in a siloed group. The nursing administrators might say, "Hey, we really need to be doing something around this," but if there's not that holistic approach and buy in from leadership, that can really be a significant challenge for implementing any kind of processes.