Employers Can Do More to Advance Health Equity

They can optimize benefits, address social issues, and expand access to care.

by

and

Ellen Kelsay

by

and

Ellen Kelsay

From the Magazine (January–February 2023) · Long read

Sam Kaplan/Trunk Archive

Summary.

Covid-19 exposed wide inequities in health in the United States and around the world. But health disparities persisted long before the pandemic.

In this article the authors explain why businesses should help find solutions to health inequities and showcase companies innovating in this space. The article outlines four opportunities for companies. They can optimize benefits and health plan offerings, address social determinants of health, expand primary care and mental health access through virtual care and community partnerships, and make benefits and health care easy to navigate.

To improve health equity among their employees and communities, businesses will need to invest in a multiyear effort and equip themselves with the right leadership, resources, and processes. Key steps for getting started include building a business case for investments, collecting data to understand specific problems, identifying an initial population to focus on, engaging a broad group of stakeholders to design solutions, and measuring progress.

Idea in Brief

The Problem

The Covid-19 pandemic revealed major disparities in health around the world: Economically and socially marginalized groups have experienced higher rates of Covid-19 infections and mortality.

Who Should Produce Solutions

Many business leaders have assumed that governments and health systems are responsible for addressing health inequities, but employers can also play a major role and have compelling reasons to do so.

The Process

Build a business case for investments. Collect data to understand specific problems. Identify an initial population to focus on. Engage a broad group of stakeholders to design solutions. Measure progress. And commit to advancing health equity.

One of the starkest lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic has been the deep health inequities present in the United States and around the world. Nearly everywhere, groups that have been economically and socially marginalized experienced higher rates of Covid-19 and morbidity and mortality from infection. In the United States, before vaccines and effective treatments were widely available, Black and Latino people were three times more likely than white individuals to be infected with Covid-19 and twice as likely to die, according to a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2023 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Shantanu Nundy, MD, is a primary care physician and chief medical officer at Accolade, a population health company that provides personalized health and benefits solutions for employers. He is the author of Care After Covid: What the Pandemic Revealed Is Broken in Healthcare and How to Reinvent It.
LC

Lisa A. Cooper, MD, is the James F. Fries Professor of Medicine and a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Why Are Health Disparities Everyone’s Problem? (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021).
EK

Ellen Kelsay is the president and CEO of Business Group on Health and a member of the American Medical Association’s In Full Health initiative on health equity.

Employers Can Do More to Advance Health Equity

Idea in Brief

The Problem

Who Should Produce Solutions

The Process

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