White men occupied 89 percent of board seats in payer organizations in 2018, according to a study from the Leverage Network, an organization that promotes Black leadership.
To conduct its study, the Leverage Network worked with the Ann Arbor-based University of Michigan's health equity leadership pipeline collaborative and law firm McGuireWoods to look at healthcare board representation from 2016-18. The study spans 623 board members at 41 of the largest healthcare organizations in the nation, across providers, payers, pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
Three payer insights:
1. When looking at payer boards in particular, the Leverage Network found Black men occupied 10 percent of seats in 2018.
2. From 2016 to 2018, the number of Black female board members decreased from 24 percent to 17 percent.
3. The number of board seats held by white women remained between 74 percent to 76 percent in the time period.
Editor's note: The Leverage Network partners with Becker's Healthcare, and Becker's Healthcare's publisher Scott Becker is a partner at McGuireWoods. However, Becker's Healthcare wasn't involved in the study.