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Addressing Health Equity During a Crisis w/ Tom Cotter, Healthcare Ready | HealthBiz Brief · CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered.

• 0:00
  Hurricane Katrina disrupted medical care and revealed the fragility of healthcare supply chains.
• 0:06
  Crises and disasters have kept right on coming since then.
• 0:09
  But there's an important difference.
• 0:11
  Healthcare ready is there to help?
• 0:20
  Welcome to Healthbiz Briefs.
• 0:21
  I'm David Williams, president of health Business Group, here with Tom Cotter, president and executive director of healthcare Ready, a public private partnership that coordinates between the healthcare supply chain and government.
• 0:33
  Tom, thanks for joining me.
• 0:35
  Thanks so much for having me, David, great to be here.
• 0:37
  So how does healthcare ready address health equity?
• 0:41
  We embed health equity in everything we do.
• 0:44
  It's not that we have our health equity portfolio over here and we have our healthcare access or supply chain resiliency portfolio over there.
• 0:54
  Every project we get, we ask the question, how can we make this more equitable?
• 0:58
  And it's a really simple concept when we think about health equity.
• 1:03
  It's triage, right?
• 1:06
  You treat the patients that need your help the most and then you focus on everyone else after that.
• 1:11
  And I think we overcomplicate the concepts here, but really we do a needs based approach and we focus investment and resources into communities and to individuals that need it the most.
• 1:24
  That makes good.
• 1:25
  Know, sometimes you think about equity, especially these days, where there's a broader discussion that's been politicized as some sort of tack on, add on thing.
• 1:33
  But I think the observation from Katrina and other disasters is that vulnerable people really get clobbered and need extra assistance.
• 1:42
  Sometimes know the rich can take care of themselves, although they may need some help as well.
• 1:46
  But that's kind of the basis of it.
• 1:48
  And vulnerable people get hammered.
• 1:51
  And this is an opportunity to work with them first on a triage basis.
• 1:54
  Like the way you described it. Absolutely.
• 1:58
  And there's a lot of data to support this.
• 1:59
  This isn't just what feels like it could be true.
• 2:03
  So much data supports this concept that you just outlined, which is there is a disproportionate effect of disasters on communities that have been historically underserved.
• 2:16
  Black and brown communities, the incarcerated children.
• 2:20
  We think about the triple demic last year, and we found some cracks in that health care system that doesn't exist for adults.
• 2:27
  There's a lot going on there.
• 2:29
  And I think acknowledging that, understanding that and then incorporating it into your planning, if you're emergency manager or into your response will ensure that.
• 2:38
  Listen, face it, if we can get the most vulnerable person access to health care after a disaster, we can get it to everybody.
• 2:44
  And so we could say the rich could take care of themselves, the poor need more help.
• 2:48
  But really, if we take a needs based approach, and we're completely agnostic to everything.
• 2:52
  We're going to naturally fall into that pattern and make sure everybody gets what they need.
• 2:56
  Sounds good. All right.
• 2:57
  So you mentioned there's a lot of data, a lot of that's been gathered since Katrina, which was almost 20 years ago by now.
• 3:03
  What have we learned since then?
• 3:06
  Well, I think we learned the importance of ensuring that everybody's at the table, whether it's cross departmental interoperability to engaging community members, to ensuring hospitals are well prepared and have the training and information they need to make decisions.
• 3:24
  I think that was probably the hardest lesson learned, and I think that we're doing a lot better at it now.
• 3:31
  It can always get better healthcare ready where a nonprofit works in public private partnership.
• 3:36
  And one of the things we do is make sure there's a common operating picture between public sector and corporations and ngos, and that's how we can make sure we mitigate the effects of any particular disaster on a community or individual.
• 3:51
  Well, one thing we don't have to worry about is whether there's going to be more disasters, since there certainly will be more disasters and crises of types that we can imagine and maybe that we can't.
• 4:00
  So my question is, is healthcare ready for the next big disaster? Absolutely.
• 4:07
  I think by building a strong foundation of ensuring that our mission is to ensure healthcare access after a disaster, whether it is supply chain resilience, or making sure that we're training clinicians and free clinics on how to create a more resilient clinic so that it's open faster.
• 4:26
  One of the things I love is I work with a distributor association, and they don't count success when medicine gets in the warehouse of a hospital.
• 4:35
  They count success when that pill gets into a patient.
• 4:37
  And I think we incorporate that in everything we do so that it doesn't matter what the hazard is, we're ready to rock and roll and ensure that we're sharing data.
• 4:48
  We're providing patients with resources and ensuring that last inch delivery all the way down to an individual person. Great.
• 4:57
  Well, my guest today on health biz, Reese, has been Tom Cotter of healthcare ready.
• 5:02
  If you like what you heard today, please check out my health Biz podcast where we have a full length interview with Tom about his life and career.
• 5:09
  Tom, thanks so much.
• 5:11
  Thank you, David. Appreciate it.