Becker's 12th Annual Meeting Speaker Series: 4 Questions with Michelle P. Wimes, JD, Senior Vice President and Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer, Children's Mercy Kansas City

Michelle P. Wimes, JD, serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer at Children's Mercy Kansas City. 

Michelle will serve on the panel "Balancing Diverse Clinical Teams for Better Patient Outcomes" at Becker's Hospital Review 12th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place in Chicago from April 25-28, 2022. 

To learn more about the conference and Michelle's session, click here.

Question: What are your top priorities for 2022?

Michelle P. Wimes: My top priorities for 2022 include:

1) completing the roll out of our inaugural Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Strategic Plan which is based on a hospital wide Diversity Workforce Assessment (DWA) we completed in 2021

2) making structural changes to our DEI ecosystem (e.g. our committees, workgroups, and taskforces) that will support implementation of the plan

3) completing a Language Access Audit (LAA) to audit our policies and practices regarding serving our immigrant and refugee community

4) finally rolling out a Physician/Clinical Provider Clinical Competency Assessment (PCPCCA) which assesses our providers’ abilities to effectively treat a cross-cultural patient base.

Q: How do you plan to pivot strategies this year to better serve patients?

MW: The three-pronged assessments that I mentioned above (e.g., the DWA, the LAA, and the PCPCCA) are meant to provide our hospital system with a holistic approach to diversity from both the workforce side and the community (patients and families) side. With the completion of each assessment, our DEI Strategic Plan will be updated to encompass new strategic approaches to address new challenges.

Q: What technologies and innovations are you most excited about in healthcare right now?

MW: We are moving to a more evidence-based approach to DEI. In that regard, we’ve just hired a new Diversity Analyst and a new Heath Equity Specialist. We have developed a DEI Workforce dashboard which enables us to track attrition, promotions and regrettable losses so that we can proactively develop policies and improve workforce practices rather than acting reactively after folks have already left the organization. We are also developing a new health equity dashboard which currently tracks our hospital utilization rates by zip codes and will ultimately include patient experience and satisfaction data segregated by race, ethnicity and language. Again, this will allow us to proactively meet the needs of our diverse patient base by understanding our equity challenges and developing tailored solutions. .

Q: What will the lasting legacy of COVID-19 be on the healthcare system?

MW: Honestly, I think that remains to be seen. We’ve seen the devastation of this pandemic on minority communities particularly which has shone a light on healthcare inequities and disparities. Because of this, I think healthcare systems must be willing to go further upstream and get creative in their problem-solving. As the Race Equity Institute’s anti-racism training states, we must stop looking at one dead fish in the water and wondering what happened to that dead fish and instead be willing to look at the water (e.g., the environment or the system) that has contaminated the fish and created the problem in the first place. This is a definite paradigm shift away from healthcare’s traditional approach.

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