The Healing ARC cultivates a collaborative space grounded in intentionality and earned trust from the impacted community. This framework establishes a space of equal partnership between historically harmed populations and culpable institutions through transparency, authenticity, and the empowerment of voices from vulnerable populations. With a focus on building trust within communities and sharing decision making power, the Healing ARC framework serves as a model for leveraging community need, input, and trust to redress systemic and institutional harm.

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare, once again, stark racial inequities in suffering and death in the United States. Simply talking about health equity is insufficient—we need action. The Healing ARC (acknowledgment, redress, and closure) framework inspires interventions that will help health facilities provide equitable access to care for all patients.

Healing ARC will provide an inspirational example of how healthcare leaders can identify and b egin to dismantle structural and institutional forms of racism that are often invisible to many actors in these systems. This is urgently needed at a time when healthcare providers are acknowledging that inequities exist, yet fail to see them in their own practices. Healing ARC reinforces the fact that racism can’t be tackled until it is clearly exposed and intentionally addressed.

The Healing Arc framework is critical as it gives us in health and medicine a path, language, skills, tools, towards true healing. It gives us a paved path to undo the harm and trauma we have normalized. It gives the future of medicine a new foundation and home to do better and be better in. So when our communities come to our “home” in their most time of need, when our communities come to us for help and healing, we truly are healing, not harming. And they leave our home with a sense of safety, genuine care – all ingredients essential to true, good, health.

In the face of deeply entrenched structural racial inequities, individuals and organizations can easily become paralyzed. The Healing ARC is proving to be a powerful antidote to that phenomenon by providing a rigorous, evidence-and-action based model for healthcare settings. I am both heartened and honored to play a role!

The application of the Healing ARC work at Brigham and Women’s Hospital should be lauded- it represents a commitment to implementing healthcare that is equitable. At a time when many well-intentioned leaders and health systems may not know how to act, Bram and Michelle’s work provides a definitive guiding framework. My hope is that more follow and that we support, uplift, and protect these leaders in their important work.

This is exciting and important work. The Healing ARC framework is one of few interventions that address clinical and institutional racism with interventions that can leverage 21st century technology in real time while simultaneously providing data for tracking and holding clinicians and hospitals administrators accountable. Community voices in this framework are important components. Collaboration between the community and a hospital’s clinical and administrative staff makes the Healing ARC framework an exemplar intervention in the nation’s ongoing efforts to redress inequities in health and healthcare.

Health equity is not a zero-sum proposition. In fact, when we improve care for historically marginalized communities, we build better systems of care for everyone. The Healing ARC framework brings health professionals and communities together to explicitly address inequities by making changes to systems that are deemed meaningful by the community who has been adversely affected. We have seen demonstrated improvement using this kind of approach, which has helped to eliminate disparities that have persisted for decades.