Primary Submission Category: Gender
CMS OMH’s Multifaceted Approach to Addressing Health Disparities
Authors: Caroline Wagner
Presenting Author: Nancy Chiles Shaffer*
Sexual and gender minorities are among the target populations for which the Centers for Medicare & Medicare Service Office of Minority Health (CMS OMH) is dedicated to identifying, understanding, and addressing the impact of health disparities. While LGBTQI+ individuals often collectively experience stigmatization for their sexual orientation or gender identity and expression, the intersectionality of race, ethnicity, income, and other social determinants of health, make sexual and gender minorities especially susceptible to poor health outcomes.
During this session, CMS OMH will highlight how we’re working consistently and conscientiously to address these disparities. We’ll begin with an overview of how we operationalize health equity through CMS’s Framework for Health Equity, before highlighting ongoing initiatives, including strategies to improve sexual orientation and gender identity data collection to better understand barriers to care and help improve the health of LGPTQI+ populations. Additionally, CMS OMH will emphasize the importance of using a multifaceted approach to accelerate health equity, highlighting how we’re working across sectors, expanding our stakeholder engagement strategy, focusing on soliciting feedback from those working directly on the frontlines, and using the feedback we receive to guide our strategies.
Finally, we’ll close by addressing the work ahead of us, particularly our continued efforts to ensure health equity is embedded within the Agency’s policies and programs. To do so, CMS OMH will continue to expand our data collection efforts to ensure CMS OMH is developing policies and programs that meet the needs of LGBTQI+ communities and address the barriers they face.