Focusing on health equity can help hospitals improve faster | ViVE 2025

Nashville – Hospitals and health systems may be looking to improve their performance in a number of ways, but some organizations neglect one area.

Lakshmi Halasyamani, MD, says hospitals aiming to get better need to look at those doing worst. She’s the chief clinical officer of Endeavor Health, a health system with nine hospitals in the Chicago area.

“We're all trying to improve our top line performance,” she says. “And we've never thought of focusing on the individuals furthest away from the goal. And if you focus on them, your top line goes up faster.

“This is about how we improve faster,” she continues. “We're not going to improve and then focus on health equity. It's through making the care equitable, that the care will improve faster.”

Halasyamani spoke about health equity during a panel discussion at the ViVE digital health conference this week. After the panel, she sat down with Chief Healthcare Executive® to talk about closing disparities.

She stresses the importance of giving better care to those who are underserved, but she also adds that those efforts are going to produce better health systems.

“It speeds up improvement. It absolutely does,” Halasyamani says. “When you focus on groups where their performance or their outcomes are furthest away from the goal, the arc of improvement will go much faster than trying to do whole system improvement initiatives.”

“It you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, right? If you're taking five different classes, you want to focus on the class where you’re getting the D. Because that's going to improve your GPA a lot more from going from a B-plus to an A-minus. So again, as we think about our opportunities, we want to focus on the populations farthest from the goal help them improve.”

Halasyamani, along with others on the panel, also pointed to the need to engage the community in efforts to close disparities. Hospitals that embark on well-intentioned efforts to improve care may still fall short if they aren’t working with organizations and leaders based in the community.

“We have to build partnerships in the communities that we serve,” she says.

“We have to identify who are those partners in those areas and in those geographies that can help us. If we know there are gaps in blood pressure control or cancer screening, what are the community organizations that know the people in those neighborhoods who can help us make those connections? So, I think those components are incredibly important as we think about building sustainable models,” she says.

In addition to reaching out to community leaders and groups in underserved communities, Halasyamani says hospitals need to do more than talk to them. They need to listen.

“I do think that we have to connect with our community organizations and focus on what they believe is important to the community,” she says.

“I think often times we bring a point of view, and we expect people to adopt that point of view because, oh, it seems so obvious," she continues. "And I think what's critically important is that the first thing we do with our community partners is listen. They have insights that we don't have because we don't live in the communities. And the majority of the patients we take care of don't live in our health system.”

Halasyamani offered other tips for hospitals and health systems that are looking to improve in health equity. She suggested that providers lean into team members with roots in the communities they are trying to reach.

“Those team members reflect the communities they serve, and many of them have ideas and input into how organizations might focus these efforts,” she says.

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Health systems should also pick manageable goals, even if it means improving in one area, such as getting more patients in a certain group to participate in preventive screenings.

“Look at the data you have,” Halasyamani says. “You have data that already informs opportunities, then pick one. Don't necessarily pick an area that's the hardest to solve. Pick something that you believe you have the opportunity to mitigate.”

“What's very interesting is, within health systems, the patients that come to us are not all equally served. So if our first goal is to actually equally serve the people already are our patients, that's a great way for us to begin our health equity journey,” she says.

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