Award of Excellence HCA Healthcare Innovation: Cultural Insights Initiative Introduced: 2015 Program Leaders: Sherri Neal, VP - Cultural Development & Inclusion; David Wedemeyer, Director - Strategic Innovation
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ounded in 1968, HCA Healthcare was one of the first hospital companies in the United States and is currently a leading provider of health care services. Based in Nashville, HCA’s locally managed facilities include more than 170 hospitals and 119 freestanding surgery centers, located in 20 U.S. states and the United Kingdom. HCA is committed to providing culturally competent care to every patient served and fostering a culture of inclusion that embraces and enriches its workforce, physicians, patients, partners, and communities. Cultural competency in health care embraces the concept of equity—patients having equal access to quality care and
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nondiscriminatory, patientcentered health care practices. To improve the organization’s ability to provide culturally competent care, HCA launched a cultural insights initiative in 2015, which began with a system-wide enterprise scan to gain a more thorough understanding of the communities served by HCA hospitals and the characteristics of patient populations. After considerable ground work and research, including the enterprise scan and presentations to leadership, HCA then launched its Cultural Insights Pilot. The pilot included the development of a cultural and linguistic patient navigator program that provides one-on-one guidance to diverse
patients moving through the health care continuum. The enterprise scan and pilot have improved language services and the collection of race, ethnicity and language (REaL) data, and advanced HCA’s cultural competency training. The Cultural Insights Initiative supports HCA’s commitment to bridging the gap between collecting meaningful patient data and reviewing the data to identify inequities in health care provision and to implement simple, yet effective, interventions to improve care for patients. Once the Cultural Insights Pilot is completed, work will begin to apply lessons learned, which will improve patient experience. PDJ