WE CARE: Improving Chronic Disease Outcomes Across the Lifespan by Addressing Structural Racism and Discrimination in the Healthcare and Social Service Systems

Background:

• Social Determinants Of Health (SDOH), are drivers of health with up to 80% of health outcome variation attributable to these factors.
• WE CARE is a SDOH screening and referral system that leverages extant clinical staff and workflows to systematically address families’ unmet needs.
• Our previous study found that significantly more caregivers of color experienced a double loss whereby their disclosed unmet needs went unaddressed than white caregivers.
• There is a gap in research evidence of an impact of SDOH screening on health outcomes.

Overall Goal: To apply an antiracism lens to an evidence-based SDOH screening/referral system and develop an antiracist-informed implementation toolkit aimed at mitigating unequal treatment and improving chronic disease outcomes for minoritized patients.

Refine the WE CARE protocol: Conducting qualitative interviews with patients to identify implementation barriers Obtaining iterative feedback from systems-level stakeholders on ways to address these barriers Creating a toolkit of implementation strategies Examine the implementation of the refined WE CARE in family practices and assess outcomes of acceptability, feasibility, penetration, equity and plans for sustainability, as well as adaptations to meet the needs of this population Examine the effectiveness of the refined WE CARE on prevalent pediatric and adult chronic diseases (i.e., asthma, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, hypertension) outcomes. The project started on September 23, 2022 and is expected to be completed by June 30, 2027.

Research team: