Center for Sustainable Health Care Quality and Equity Expands DRIVE Toolkit to Address COVID-19 Health Disparities

The Center for Sustainable Health Care Quality and Equity (SHC), a division of the National Minority Quality Forum (NMQF), today announced the expansion of its Demonstrating Real Improvement in Value and Equity (DRIVE) program to address racial and ethnic disparities surrounding COVID-19 among diverse and underserved communities. The COVID-19 DRIVE toolkit is intended to help primary care teams, health care systems, and community organizations improve health outcomes and vaccination rates as well as enhance quality performance.  

“The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted communities of color due to embedded systemic factors. Black Americans are nearly twice as likely to die of COVID-19 and Latinos are three times as likely to be hospitalized,” said Dr. Gary A. Puckrein, Ph.D., president and CEO of NMQF. “In addition to tackling health disparities, the DRIVE toolkit works to address population health, an increasingly important metric for health care providers, to attain improved outcomes at the community level.”

DRIVE brings together the most effective tools and resources based on learnings from health care systems and primary care practices working in underserved areas and the communities they serve. The COVID-19 toolkit, made possible by a grant from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, aims to reach the following goals:

• Address disparities in key clinical focus areas to close health inequities in underserved populations

• Increase awareness on how key clinical focus areas can worsen chronic medical conditions such as diabetes, lung disease and heart disease

• Utilize big data to identify high risk populations and leverage those insights strategically with key stakeholders

• Highlight the benefits of treatment in key clinical focus areas that eliminates or reduces the severity of the illness, including for people with chronic health conditions

• Create a replicable quality improvement model, as well as regional communications, to help close health inequities in local clinics and/or health systems

• Identify national and regional advocates for key clinical focus areas in underserved communities to facilitate and improve public health

• Generate sustainable, positive change in key clinical focus areas that will live – and grow – past the duration of the project

The DRIVE concept has been previously used to address growing racial and ethnic disparities in influenza vaccination rates. In February 2021, the DRIVE initiative was recognized as one of the top five Corporate Social Responsibility programs of 2020 by Global Business Alliance.

“We created the DRIVE COVID-19 toolkit to meet the needs identified through our research and countless conversations with health care professionals and community leaders working on the front lines each day to battle the pandemic and reach diverse communities,” said Laura Lee Hall, Ph.D., President of SHC. “Our DRIVE program has a strong, proven track record of success and we are excited to offer these new resources to assist professionals as they continue to fight COVID-19 in our most vulnerable communities.”

About the National Minority Quality Forum The National Minority Quality Forum assists health care providers, professionals, administrators, researchers, policymakers, and community and faith-based organizations in delivering appropriate health care to minority communities. This assistance is based on providing the evidence in the form of science, research, and analysis that will lead to the effective organization and management of system resources to improve the quality and safety of health care for the entire population of the U.S., including minorities.

This article was shared with Prittle Prattle News as a Press Release by PRNewswire.

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