Stacey Caywood, Chief Executive Officer of Wolters Kluwer Health, is focused on identifying ways to overcome the long-term challenges of widespread inequities in global health.
Tackling systemic obstacles will require investment, better use of health data, and trustworthy medical information resources, according to Caywood who was discussing these elements of Wolters Kluwer’s Best Care Everywhere program in a recent interview on MarketScale.
In her discussion with MarketScale, Caywood emphasizes that tackling health inequity “is in our DNA” at Wolters Kluwer, to deliver the best care everywhere. She discusses the three steps Wolters Kluwer is taking to address the ongoing challenge of achieving health equity.
“First, we have a US and global donation program, working with partners like Ariadne Labs to provide more access to the best evidence no matter where you live,” Caywood says, referring to Wolters Kluwer’s partnerships with the Better Evidence program at Ariadne Labs, a joint center at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and with the Society of General Internal Medicine. Through these programs, Wolters Kluwer provides complimentary UpToDate subscriptions to qualifying health workers on the frontlines of care who are working hard to make life-or-death decisions, often without access to the latest clinical evidence.
Caywood continues: “Second, we know you can’t fix health equity if you can’t find it, and you need health data to do that. Our Health Language team is mapping that disparate data to make sense of it, to help populations that are most at risk.” Aggregating different data sources and formats can obscure population health insights. Standardizing them for uniformity can unlock real-time insights to inform population and patient health management and quality reporting programs.
The third point Caywood discusses is a focus on guiding healthcare towards inclusivity and equity: “Delivering the best care everywhere starts at the core content and tools that clinicians are using every day. This means reducing unconscious bias in those resources that can negatively impact patient care decisions. This also applies to supporting the training and the delivery that’s needed, so that everyone has access to the best care, one improved decision at a time.”
To help realize this goal, Wolters Kluwer launched a DE&I Content Guide for Healthcare. The language of healthcare consists of anything that is written, visual, spoken, or in any way communicated to healthcare professionals and patients, guiding the decisions they make. Bias in healthcare language can have a detrimental impact on patient care. The guide promotes the development and updating of unbiased and culturally sensitive content. The resource seeks to ensure content is representative of the diverse customers, healthcare providers, students, and patients Wolters Kluwer serves, so clinical decisions are based on bias-free evidence.