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Roadmap to Health Equity

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Overview

In 2017, Americares, the National Association of Free and Charitable Clinics, Loyola University Chicago, and a consortium of stakeholders including state-level FCC associations and individual free and charitable clinics from across the country, launched Quality of Care in Free and Charitable Clinics: Roadmap to Health Equity (Roadmap). The goal of Roadmap is to improve the quality of care and reduce health inequity for the millions of patients who seek care in free and charitable clinics nationwide. We thank Becton, Dickinson and Company and Quest Diagnostics Foundation for their generous support of the Roadmap to Health Equity initiative. 

Click the link below to read an overview of Roadmap. 

Read an overview of Roadmap

About the Program

The Need

Quality means doing the right thing, for the right patient, at the right time, in the right way to achieve the best possible results. Equity ensures each person has the chance to achieve their fullest health potential. We cannot have quality without equity. We know that free and charitable clinics provide high-quality care. We also know that inequities within healthcare do exist. We know that if you can’t measure the care that is being provided, you cannot improve it. But there is a lack of evidence on the quality of care provided by free and charitable clinics nationwide.

The Approach

Until Roadmap to Health Equity, there has never been a nationwide method of collecting data to measure the quality of care provided by free and charitable clinics. To do so, we developed a national data repository to capture quality measures and stratify them by demographics to identify and address inequity. By facilitating internal and external benchmarking, Roadmap supports clinics as they break down barriers to equitable care and position internal systems and workflows to support the delivery of quality care. Currently there are 43 pilot clinics participating in Roadmap and 10 workgroups made up of stakeholder volunteers who help inform our progress.

Pilot Clinics

Click here to view a map of Roadmap pilot clinics

Article:

Don’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Good: A Proof of Concept for a Custom National Data Repository of Quality Measures for Free and Charitable Clinics

Julie S. Darnell, Michael Perry, Nicole Lamoureux, and Edith Lee

Health Equity. Oct 2022.708-716. | http://doi.org/10.1089/heq.2022.0078

Read the full article

Questions?

Questions about Roadmap to Health Equity? Contact us below.

Roadmap General Contact

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Quality Measures

The measures used in this initiative to assess and compare the quality of health care organizations are classified as either a structure, process, or outcome measure. Known as the Donabedian model, this classification system was named after the physician and researcher who formulated it.