State Farm, Walmart and Target join the fight to end racial disparities in healthcare

The first step in creating an equitable healthcare system is to recognize that the current one isn’t.

Grand Rounds Health and Doctor On Demand, a leader in virtual care, recently launched a solution meant to help remove barriers to care for the Black community. The Black Community Innovation Coalition is made up of global and Fortune 500 companies, such as Accenture, State Farm, Target and Walmart. Through the coalition, the providers will offer to employers a dedicated service and platform focused primarily on improving the healthcare experience for Black Americans .

“Our mission is to raise the standard of healthcare for everyone — and we’re pretty serious about the ‘everyone’ part,” says Dr. Ian Tong, chief medical officer at Doctor on Demand. “The Black community has been very marginalized by our healthcare system. We can see evidence across a vast array of clinical outcomes that show that members of the Black community don't get the same access to care.”

Read more: ‘Put your money where your mouth is’: Employers stumble on what’s next for DEI

In 2017, 89% of African Americans had healthcare coverage compared to 93% of white Americans, according to findings made by the Center of American Progress. Only 44% of African Americans had government health insurance that year, and 12% of African Americans under the age of 65 reported having no health care coverage at all that year.

It’s not that there’s a lesser need in this demographic — there’s actually more. The risk of mortality from cardiovascular conditions is two times higher for Black patients than that of white ones, according to Tong. Additionally, Black women who get pregnant are three to four times more likely to experience pregnancy-related mortality than white women.

“Some of it is because of implicit bias that exists within the clinicians that deliver the care,” Tong says. “But a lot of it is due to the segregation of our neighborhoods and because a lot of healthcare is local. What we need to do is redesign primary care and we need to redesign our health system to deliberately address some of these health disparities.”

Read more: Remote work has vastly improved the Black worker experience

Which is exactly what this new coalition aims to do. One of the largest issues facing Black employees is that most of the healthcare options offered by employers play into these disparities and these biases. So instead, when a member of the Black community needs help from a clinician, they'll be able to pick up the Doctor on Demand app and be met with a navigation service that is culturally competent and a network prepared to help them navigate through the system and advocate for their specific needs.

The product will first launch within the companies that have joined the Black Community Innovation Coalition, where they will work closely together to inform the product through a combination of targeted market research studies, employee-led focus groups, population health analyses and product design workshops, according to the press release. Then, once there's a significant amount of data, there could be potential for a full product launch.

“The root of the problem is that the system was not designed for them,” Tong says. “We want to design the system for them. And for that, we have to do the listening and create the belonging within those groups.”