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Jack Lynch describes a moment when a light bulb went on in his head.
Lynch, the president and CEO of Main Line Health, recalls a conversation he had with a Black healthcare colleague working at another health system about five years ago. He asked if his colleague’s CEO thought there were racial disparities in the system’s emergency department, and the colleague said, “No.”
When Lynch asked his colleague if thought there was disparities in emergency care, the response was, “Absolutely.”
“What it caused me to believe is that many, many, many CEOs and C-suite leaders and boards don’t have a line of sight, and clinicians don’t have a line of sight, into these terrible disparities of care,” Lynch says.
For years, Main Line Health has developed dashboards measuring patient outcomes in key areas such as readmissions and infections. More recently, Main Line has been able to produce data showing outcomes by race, ethnicity and type of insurance, Lynch says.
“Most health systems don’t have line of sight to that level of detail,” Lynch says.