New Health Equity Project aims to significantly reduce health disparities in MI – U-M Health

Excerpts from the article:

The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has pledged to provide a $9 million Medicaid match to launch a new Health Equity Project in five Michigan counties.

The Health Equity Project aims to help these counties reduce health disparities associated with pressing social needs such as housing instability, food insecurity, transportation, health system complexity, and other socioeconomic factors by:

• supporting efforts to connect people from historically disadvantaged populations to needed social services,
• sharing data between relevant health and social service providers to facilitate improved care,
• providing population-based data and informatics to analysts, stakeholders, and policymakers, and
• better engaging with, and reflecting on the views of, community members with lived experience.
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Core partners in the Health Equity Project include:

• the Center for Health and Research Transformation(link is external) (CHRT), a nonprofit health research and policy center at the University of Michigan, which will provide backbone support to the participating regional health collaboratives;
• the Michigan Data Collaborative(link is external) (MDC), a data collection, aggregation, and reporting organization at the University of Michigan, which will collect data from a variety of sources and deliver population-based reports;
• the Michigan Health Information Network(link is external) (MiHIN), a nonprofit collaborative that securely stores patient health information and transmits relevant patient data to legally authorized health care providers; and
• the Michigan Social Health Innovations to Eliminate Disparities(link is external) (MSHIELD) Collaborative Quality Improvement (CQI) initiative at Michigan Medicine, supported by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, which will engage provider organizations around the state and seek to identify and promote processes that lead to improved and more equitable health care outcomes.​​​​​​​