Biotechnology company Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, has awarded a research grant to Yale Cancer Center (YCC) and Smilow Cancer Hospital (SCH) to measure, address, and create accountability around cancer health inequities. The 2-year, $750k award will fund a partnership between The Equity Research and Innovation Center (ERIC) at Yale School of Medicine and the Center for Community Engagement and Health Equity (CEHE) at YCC and SCH to embed a health equity framework into SCH’s current quality measurement program.
“We are so thankful to Genentech for providing us this opportunity to develop a robust and meaningful, anti-racist informed portfolio of health equity and quality measures,” said Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MHS, Director of the Center for Community Engagement and Health Equity for YCC and SCH, as well as Chief Health Equity Officer & Deputy Chief Medical Officer, at SCH, and Associate Cancer Center Director for Community Outreach and Engagement at YCC and principal investigator of the project. “Our plan is to engage community members, patients, and additional stakeholders to help capture accurate race, ethnicity, and language data to validate new equity specific measures.”
Grant goals include the identification of high impact equity sensitive measures along the cancer care continuum and to stratify SCH data by race, ethnicity, and language to identify health inequities within these measures. Researchers also hope to develop both an internal and community facing Health Equity and Quality Dashboard that displays SCH specific quality data and performance improvement goals for a new health equity measure portfolio.
“We are excited to partner with Dr. Nunez-Smith and her team to help develop, test, and iterate health equity informed institutional, community, and policy level interventions that address identified inequities and drive performance improvement,” said Charles Fuchs, MD, MPH, Director of Yale Cancer Center and Physician-in-Chief at Smilow Cancer Hospital. “This effort will help improve our understanding of and reduce health disparities relevant to cancer care.”