2020 CMS Health Equity Award Presented to UnitedHealthcare and Atrium Health for Outstanding Work Reducing Disparities

Office of Minority Health

Today, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) presented the 2020 CMS Health Equity Awards to recognize organizations that demonstrate an exceptional commitment to health equity by reducing disparities among vulnerable populations. The 2020 winners are UnitedHealthcare and Atrium Health, for using a strategic approach to identify, prioritize, and address health disparities.

This is the third year we’ve awarded the annual CMS Health Equity Award to identify organizations:

• Working to achieve health equity for vulnerable populations.
• Showing leadership and successful approaches to reduce disparities.

UnitedHealthcare

UnitedHealthcare is a payer that:

• Covers millions of people of all ages with different types of insurance. 
• Seeks to cover high quality care.
• Seeks to be responsive to the needs of each beneficiary and their communities. 
• Partners with care providers, collaborating in new ways to improve patient care.

Focusing on 3 states, UnitedHealthcare used many different activities to reduce maternal health disparities. They identified gaps in postpartum care for Medicaid enrollees, and designed culturally and regionally tailored interventions to reduce disparities.

UnitedHealthcare’s specific focus was to promote early and comprehensive postpartum care using community health workers to evaluate and help members in Michigan, Ohio, and Hawaii with their unique needs. These activities included home visits, local primary care and obstetric nurse partnerships, and care coordination.

As a result, between 2018 and 2019, UnitedHealthcare reduced disparities in timely postpartum care for Black women by 42.4% in Michigan (from 15.1% to 8.7%) and by 83.2% in Ohio (from 19.6% to 3.3%), and by 40.3% for rural women in Hawaii (from 12.9% to 7.7%). 

Read more about UnitedHealthcare’s health equity work.

Atrium Health

Atrium Health, formerly known as Carolinas HealthCare System, is a health care organization that connects patients with on-demand care, specialists and a primary care network. They focus on:

• Delivering quality patient care.
• Supporting medical research and education.
• Joining with partners to keep the community healthy.

To address racial and ethnic disparities in colorectal cancer screening rates, Atrium Health strengthened their data and collaboration with community partners. By redesigning their electronic medical record (EMR), they transformed the way they collect demographic data – adding or improving questions on race, ethnicity, language preference, assigned sex at birth, and gender identity.  Atrium also created a tool that stratifies data related to mortality, diabetes, hypertension, colorectal cancer screening, and high-risk medications by race, ethnicity, gender, and location.

This data was used to implement a number of culturally appropriate interventions at the primary care practice and community levels.  The interventions included a phone call campaign and working with a Spanish-language newspaper, resulting in an additional 200 screenings and the detection of some cancers at earlier stages.  As a result, from 2018 to 2019, Atrium Health closed the disparity of colorectal screenings for Hispanic males compared to white males from 10.7% to 6.6%, a reduction of 38.3%.

Read more about Atrium Health’s health equity work. 

Learn more about what we’re doing to reduce disparities and sign up for the CMS Office of Minority Health listserv.