Campaign Fact Sheet

Healing ARC Campaign FACT Sheet

• A prominent group of health professionals, community leaders, and healthcare equity advocates launched a campaign in Massachusetts to raise awareness of the Healing ARC framework, which is inspiring race-conscious collaborations that help rectify patient care inequities in hospitals and care facilities.

• Under this framework, Healing ARC applications counter the notion that race-blind solutions alone can effectively fix systems and structures broken by racism in the healthcare systems in communities across the country.

• The Healing ARC framework is working to create an environment where hospitals and health centers treat ALL patients with dignity, respect, and fairness. Massachusetts residents, like those nationwide, are entitled to patient-centered and people-centered healthcare, which requires addressing the institutional racism that prevents some, particularly those in communities of color, from receiving equal care. 

• We strongly believe that racism is the root cause of health inequities affecting people of color. It is a product of historic and contemporary beliefs in a hierarchy of human value, a perception long embedded in our society that race, ethnicity, physical characteristics or place of origin elevate one demographic or suppress another, establishing an illusion of white superiority in the minds of too many.

• The campaign is educating hospital and healthcare system administrators, lawmakers, social justice advocates, communities, and others about the value of race-conscious interventions, such as those implemented under the Healing ARC framework. Currently, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston is using the Healing ARC framework to eliminate an inequity in patient care delivery.

• In 2015, two doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Michelle E. Morse MD, MPH, and Bram P. Wispelwey, MD, MPH, MS worked on a study that found, on average, that fewer Black and Hispanic patients diagnosed with heart failure in the emergency department at their hospital were admitted to the specialty cardiology unit that improves patient outcomes.

• In response to this example of structural racism, Morse and Wispelwey, as well as other colleagues, used the Healing ARC framework to develop a practical care delivery model that can save lives and paves the way for better treatment for Black and Hispanic heart failure patients at the hospital.

• Earlier this year, BWH launched a pilot program using the Healing Arc application. When the emergency room treats a person of color with heart failure a new, more equitable, process is in place at the hospital.

• If a physician selects admission to the General Internal Medical service for the patient of color rather than the cardiology service, the clinician receives a “Best Practice Advisory” from the electronic health record system: “Patient is from a racial or ethnic group with historically inequitable access to the cardiology service; consider changing admission to Cardiology unless extreme census or overriding clinical reasons for General Medicine service.” The physician can either change their decision and admit to Cardiology or override the Best Practice Advisory and continue admission to General Medicine. 

• Through the pilot, early results show the Healing ARC application is impacting the admission of Blacks and Hispanics to cardiology. Data shows improved health outcomes for patients sent to cardiology specialists, including lower 30-day readmission rates compared with patients who were admitted to general medicine.

• Morse, Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Commissioner for New York City’s Health Department, is applying the Healing ARC framework in New York City through the Coalition to End Racism in Clinical Algorithms (CERCA). The initiative seeks to end race adjustment in clinical algorithms and accelerate connections to care for patients of color whose care was delayed by the racist practice.

• Recently, CERCA released an inaugural report, saying “race-based equations were often built upon now debunked race-as-biology theories.”

• The Healing ARC campaign’s objective is to expand Healing ARC applications to more hospitals, healthcare facilities, and public health institutions, while explaining why the care delivery model at BWH is needed, what it can achieve, and why race-conscious interventions are required to dismantle racism in healthcare.

• The campaign will also highlight other applications of the Healing ARC framework that are transforming health care and its delivery. For instance, the CERCA work in New York City and at the University of Virginia Medical Center, which has begun implementing a Healing ARC approach. 

• The Healing ARC framework mandates innovative approaches to collaborating with communities, creating a path for them to play instrumental roles in shaping the corrective action. “Wisdom Councils” have been organized in coordination with the work at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. 

• Wisdom Council members provide community voices, insights, and recommendations throughout stages of implementation for a Healing ARC model. Stage one requires providers and institutions to acknowledge that racism contributes to inequitable health outcomes. Stage two is designed to redress the harm by providing restitution to the harmed population, including opening access to services and care historically denied. Stage three is to facilitate closure through reconciliation and agreement that the harm has been redressed.

• The campaign is supported by the Rx Foundation, a Massachusetts-based, philanthropic organization committed to advancing equity, quality healthcare and community health delivery in Massachusetts, and other locations in the United States. Launched in 2002, the Foundation has provided more than $20M in grants to hospitals, nonprofits, community organizations, and researchers working to overcome barriers impeding the delivery of equitable, safe, high quality, health care to everyone.

The Advisory Committee for the Healing ARC Campaign includes:

• Dr. Michelle E. Morse, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Commissioner for New York City’s Health Department
• Dr. Bram P. Wispelwey, MD, MPH, MS, an Instructor in Medicine at BWH and Instructor at the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
• Dr. Camara Jones MD, MPH, PhD Leverhulme Visiting Professor in Global Health and Social Medicine School of Global Affairs King’s College London; Past President American Public Health Association
• Manisha Sharma, MD, FAAFP, Senior Medical Director, Community Health Group; founding partner of the social impact PR firm, CentiVox Media Group; Co-Founder of the Civic Health Alliance
• Jennifer Goldsmith, MS, Med Program Director, BWH; Managing Director, EqualHealth; consultant with the Groundwater Institute; teaches a global health course at Tufts University. EqualHealth; Adjunct Faculty, Tufts University
• Kayty Himmelstein, MD, MSEd, an Infectious Disease Fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA; member of the White Coats for Black Lives National Working Group
• Tanvi Avasthi, MSN, MA, RN, CNM, WHNP-BC
• Scott Nakagawa, Co-Director, 22nd Century Initiative
• Casey Fox, NP, Cambridge Health Alliance
• Courtni Andrews, MPH, Health Scientist
• Regan Marsh, MD, MPH, the Medical Director for Health Equity within the Department of Quality and Safety at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Senior Strategic Advisor to Partners In Health; Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
• Benjamin Perkins, an ordained community minister at Hope Central Congregational Church in Jamaica Plain, MA; a program leader consultant with Groundwater/Impactive; chair of the FED (Fidelity, Equity and Dignity) committee of Wholesome Wave.

• Dave A. Chokshi, MD, MSc, FACP was the 43rd Commissioner at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

• Lawrence Vinson, VP of Health Strategies at the American Heart Association

• Cassandra Georges, Program Manager, Mass General Brigham – Office of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Social Justice.

• Dr. Michael Wilson, Associate Physician, Emergency Medicine Associate Physician, Emergency Medicine Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Instructor Harvard Medical School