The Moral Playbook for Health Equity (106X)

As healthcare leaders, we know that we are ethically obligated to ensure our organizations provide high-quality, equitable care to all populations. However, entrenched inequities in health outcomes across racial, socioeconomic and demographic lines reveal an alignment between these ethical duties and current practices. Efforts to advance health equity have proliferated yet often remain siloed diversity initiatives disconnected from healthcare's core ethical foundations. And now the very idea of advancing health equity is being questioned by some.

To overcome these challenges, health equity can no longer be viewed as separate programming—it must be the moral compass orienting our organizations' strategies, policies, workforce development and community partnerships. As ethical commitments are institutional cornerstones, achieving health equity is essential to demonstrating these bona fide commitments. Healthcare leaders must reframe health equity as a fundamental ethical imperative inherently tied to the foundations of quality patient care. By reframing health equity as fundamentally intertwined with our ethical commitments, we ground it as inviolable—an indisputable imperative in providing care.

Through interactive dialogue, vignettes and case studies, participants will have the opportunity to explore: Linking health equity standards that are required by the Joint Commission, CMS and NCQA to a health system's operational effectiveness; framing health equity as central to the core efforts to measure the impact of key programs on population health; and creating the moral and ethical arguments that can be linked to the business case to advance health equity. The session is ideal for leaders in population health, patient experience, human resources, DEI and health equity to support their individual and collective efforts to integrate the moral and ethical case to advance health equity.