In response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and events taking place across the United States, HFTH hosted our 4th webinar focused on racial disparities and equity within healthcare systems.

Moderators: Andrea Cooks, MS and Brandan Kennedy, MD

Presenters: Andrea Cooks, MS, Nonye Madu, MPH, Myrtede Alfred, PhD, & Ray Chan, MD

Times for each presentation start are listed before the presenters' names if you are interested in jumping to a particular presenter.

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0:00 Andrea Cooks, MS, is an embedded Human Factors Engineer/Consultant at Cincinnati Children's Hospital in Ohio. Andrea shares her personal story of racial inequities experienced while seeking care for her mother within the healthcare system and how these experiences motivated her to seek employment in a hospital. She works every day to fix the "leak" in the healthcare system, with the mission to help all people who enter the system, no matter what they look like, where they live or who they are.

10:35 Ray Chan, MD, is a Pediatric Hospitalist and Human Factors Physician Scientist at Children's Mercy Hospital Kansas City. Ray discusses how racial disparities are perpetuated within the healthcare system through the use of evidence based medicine. Research is extremely important to Ray and many of the epidemiological and peer reviewed studies that physicians are taught and use to make diagnoses, rely heavily on a patient's race.

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25:25 Nonye Madu, MPH, is the Enterprise Improvement Advisor at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's Center for Healthcare Quality and Analytics. Nonye discusses her ongoing quest to make health equity an institutional strategic priority at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Her quality improvement (QI) research revealed to hospital leadership that broad system standardizations do not help all patients in an equitable fashion. As a result, a Health Equity QI Steering Committee was formed, which works to ensure that equity is a prevalent factor in all QI projects. Nonye is also working to determine what barriers healthcare systems have put in place that prevent patients from getting the best care possible and knows that an HF perspective would be an extremely valuable addition to better understanding these barriers.

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56:20 Myrtede Alfred, PhD, is a Research Assistant Professor with the Department of Anesthesia & Perioperative Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina. Myrtede discusses the decades of racial disparities in maternal health and explains racism's continuous influence on medicine. She shares her findings on the extreme discrepancies of maternal mortality rates between black women and white women in the U.S. due to racial disparities and "race as biology." Her research shows that these disparities are built into healthcare systems. There has not been much HF research or involvement in reducing health disparities or marginalized communities, but Myrtede believes that there are many benefits in embedded HF practitioners assisting to reduce the issue of race in healthcare.