Achieving Health Equity: The Importance of Patient Input at Every Phase of Care

Imagine trying to get diagnosed and not finding a care partner who identifies with you or a healthcare professional misrepresenting your gender because they did not properly read your chart.

In this video, our Diversity and Inclusion Patient Council illuminates the impact of inequities in receiving healthcare and how we can work together to be Upstanders for one another.

The value of our patients’ voices

Our Health Equity Collaborative’s objective was to evolve their current, internal resources by more overtly infusing the patient voice and perspective at every phase of care to begin addressing the negative outcomes that prevent equitable access to healthcare for the most vulnerable of patients.

To gain deeper insights, we turned to the expertise of our patient council, which represents a balanced group of various race/ethnicities, gender and gender expression, age, income, education, region, living situation, and disease experience.

What patients experience

Members of the council shared stories that exemplified how health disparities, racism, and other discrimination impacted their ability to get proper care. They expressed how their needs and experiences were not being properly heard and, all too often, remain unaddressed. Even more insightful, these negative experiences went beyond drug discovery and development and began at point of care, especially during diagnosis.

How we collected input

Through workshops, town hall meetings, and interviews, we solicited the council’s feedback on various patient-centered projects and initiatives, including clinical trials. The insights we gained propelled the team into action helping re-shape our approach to advancing healthy equity and transform patient input into actionable steps.

Telling our patients’ stories

This animation helps raise awareness of health equity as well as tell the stories of patients in their own voice and based on their own experiences.

We want to better understand health disparities, how experiences negatively impact patients, and to inspire all employees to ask the question - what can I do to be more inclusive in my approach to drug development, commercialization, and clinical trials. Our purpose is to challenge every employee at our family-owned company to look at their work through a health equity lens because we believe to be truly patient centric, we need to understand the experiences and unmet needs of all patients. A recent example of how we’re working with a health equity lens is through our Hear Your Heart campaign.

Prioritizing health equity in our medication development process connects to the ‘More Potential’ efforts of our Sustainable Development for Generations (SD4G) Strategy, which is our commitment to continue providing good health for people and animals, the planet, and society that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of the future.