Achieving Health Equity: Lessons from Civil Rights, History and Solutions from the Frontlines

FasterCures?initiated a body of programmatic and policy work to advance system change within biomedical research to focus on and value health equity as well as diversity and representation within clinical trials.

Improving health outcomes for all includes exposing the historical and systematic inequalities across health systems through advocating for civil and human rights, and access to unbiased healthcare and medical research.

As part of our ongoing commitment to this work, FasterCures released a report with a detailed action plan to address diversity across clinical trials and the biomedical research ecosystem. Our work informs legislative proposals and federal regulations as it pertains to policies to improve diversity in clinical trials, many of which are summarized in this policy brief.

Call to Action

According to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 2015-2019?Drug Trials Snapshots Summary Report, of all participants in clinical trials, only 7 percent were Black or African American, 13 percent were Hispanic or Latino, and 1 percent identified as American Indian or Alaska Native, in comparison to 76 percent of trial participants identifying as White. When clinical trials are appropriately diverse, they can represent the broader population and increase the health of underrepresented groups.?This underrepresentation demonstrates the need for achieving health equity across the ecosystem for the patients who need life-saving treatments and therapeutics and for the communities that have been historically underserved.

This June FasterCures?hosted the first-ever Milken Institute Health Equity Forum in collaboration with the?National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. The lessons of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s continue to shed new light on the modern-day inequities and disparities long held within our healthcare, financial, and public policy systems. The COVID-19 pandemic also laid bare inequities that have been decades, if not centuries, in the making.

To build upon these learnings, we convened national and local leaders to educate, share solutions and initiate new policies to create a more equitable future. The private gathering included over 60 leaders compromised of experts in community health, business, patient advocacy, and health administration. Event sponsors included the Mayo Clinic, Takeda Pharmaceuticals and Merck whose own business practices incorporate a commitment to ensuring access to care, innovation, and representation.

Health Equity Forum Objectives

The Forum program weaved in key issues that need to be addressed to further promote equitable health outcomes. Event objectives included:

• Learn from experts across sectors through thought-provoking programming.
• Attend action-oriented sessions designed to facilitate an open exchange of ideas and solutions.
• Contribute to thought leadership to develop actionable recommendations and resources.
• Build new relationships, collaborate, and network with influential public and private-sector organizations.
• Engage in curated networking opportunities that allow for deeper dives on top-of-mind issues for achieving health equity.

Key Takeaways and Opportunities to Realize an Equitable System

The Forum highlighted case studies from organizations on the ground working in communities, expert thought leadership, and lived and learned experiences. Key takeaways included the need to invest in health research, the value of community engagement, and a necessary focus on other determinants and barriers such as social and economic mobility, access to health care, and geographic environment.

Some of the opportunities to advance health equity include:

• better integrated, universal health care coverage,
• coverage and reimbursement for early-stage screening and detection, and navigation to care,
• hub-and-spoke healthcare network models that integrate advanced-care centers with community-based health systems,
• blended virtual and direct care delivery models, paralleled by less emphasis on traditional facility-based models, to enable high-quality care in the places where patients live,
• better, more streamlined access to cancer clinical trials for more diverse patients, and
• embedding it into our policies and business models, with practical solutions for eliminating inequities that exacerbate health disparities.

Next Steps

FasterCures is preparing an issue brief and a report that more fully summarizes the Forum’s key takeaways, including details about implementation and accountability, and recommendations for sustainability. We are also producing a virtual workshop series focused on the implementation of health equity across the biomedical research ecosystem.

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About FasterCures

FasterCures, a center of the Milken Institute, is working to build a system that is effective, efficient, and driven by a clear vision: patient needs above all else. We believe that transformative and life-saving science should be fully realized and deliver better treatments to the people who need them.

About the Milken Institute

The Milken Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank focused on accelerating measurable progress on the path to a meaningful life. With a focus on financial, physical, mental, and environmental health, we bring together the best ideas and innovative resourcing to develop blueprints for tackling some of our most critical global issues through the lens of what’s pressing now and what’s coming next.