The coronavirus pandemic didn’t give rise to health inequities in the U.S. Rather, it revealed and exacerbated them.
That was the consensus of a panel at Fortune ’s Brainstorm Health conference in Dana Point, Calif., on Monday, just over a year after the federal COVID-19 Public Health Emergency ended. “It exposed the deep fissures within our health care system,” said Dr.
Uché Blackstock, founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity . “Many of us knew what those fissures were, but I think to a more general audience, it exposed them in a way that [they] had never been exposed before.” Jayasree Iyer, PhD, CEO of the Access to Medicine Foundation , echoed, “Health equity has been a chronic issue for time immemorial.
” Age, sex and gender, race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and digital literacy are among the determinants of health equity , defined by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as “the attainment of the highest level of health for all people.” In the U.S.
for example, COVID-19 morbidity and mortality were higher among Black, Hispanic, and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, noted a 2023 analysis in the Avicenna Journal of Medicine . The silver lining? The pandemic woke people up to the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in medicine, according to Dr. Hala Borno, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and cofounder and CEO of Trial Library .
“It emboldened org.
