AMA CME Accreditation Information
Credit Designation Statement: The American Medical Association designates this enduring material activity for a maximum of 0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
CME Disclosure Statement: Unless noted, all individuals in control of content reported no relevant financial relationships.
If applicable, all relevant financial relationships have been mitigated.
Video Transcripts:
The AMA's Mission and Vision to Advancing Health Equity and Justice
The AMA's strategic plan details how we will address and center people of marginalized and minoritized communities who struggle to access the most basic resources in our health care systems.
Through collaborative and urgent action, our bold and necessary path forward will transform health care.
To engage in this partnership, we ask our network of health care leaders to provide solutions that establish local, regional, and national health care equity and racial justice standards, benchmarks, incentives, and metrics that end health inequities and the use of race-based medicine.
These solutions will ensure that augmented intelligence is free from harmful, biased algorithms so we can prioritize equity in innovation, including design, development, implementation, and dissemination of new health care technologies.
Collectively, we can prevent the exclusion of marginalized and minoritized communities by ensuring just representation in medical school admissions and education.
We can eliminate all forms of discrimination, exclusion, and oppression in training, hiring, matriculation, promotion, and leadership ranks by implementing mandatory anti-racism, structural competency, and equity-explicit training for all staff.
Inequities are not new—and their consequences on individual and systematic injustice in our country must be addressed.
To move forward, we must prioritize accountability and begin to visualize, normalize, organize, and operationalize strategies to integrate the voices and ideas of people and communities experiencing injustices, who are currently being deprived of the tools and resources necessary to lead healthy lives.
We welcome you to join us as we lead this charge together!
Five Strategic Approaches to Advancing Health Equity and Justice
The American Medical Association's strategic plan is a three-year roadmap that will pave the way to embedding equity and justice in our health care systems. The following five strategic approaches will plant the initial seeds for action and accountability:
Our first approach is to embed racial and social justice throughout the AMA enterprise culture, systems, policies, and practices.
By building the AMA's capacity to understand and operationalize anti-racism equity strategies through training and tool development, we will ensure equitable structures, processes, and accountability in the AMA's workforce, contracts, budgeting, communications, and publishing.
To inform our work, we will integrate a trauma-informed lens and approach to developing and implementing policies and practices and assessing organizational change in culture, policy, and processes over time.
Our second approach is to build alliances and share power with historically marginalized and minoritized physicians and other stakeholders.
We will develop structures and processes to consistently center the experiences and ideas of historically marginalized and minoritized communities and establish a coalition of multidisciplinary, multisectoral equity experts in health care and public health to collectively advocate for justice.
Our third approach is to push upstream to address all determinants of health and the root causes of inequities by strengthening physicians' knowledge of public health and structural and social drivers of health and inequities. We will empower physicians to dismantle structural racism and intersecting systems of oppression and equip our health care systems to improve services, technology, and partnerships that advance public health and health equity.
Our fourth approach is to ensure equitable structures and opportunities in innovation by embedding racial justice and health equity within existing AMA health care innovation efforts and equipping the health care innovation sector to advance equity and justice.
We will center, integrate, and amplify historically marginalized and minoritized communities who are health care investors and innovators and engage in cross-sector collaboration and advocacy efforts.
Lastly, our fifth approach is to foster pathways for truth, racial healing, reconciliation, and transformation for the AMA's past. By amplifying and integrating the often “invisible-ized” narratives of historically marginalized physicians and patients in all that we do and quantifying the effects of AMA policy and process decisions that excluded, discriminated against, and harmed marginalized and minoritized communities, we will start repairing and cultivating a healing journey for a more equitable and just health care system.
As a national leader in health care, it is up to us to lean into our influence and play a more prominent role in the current national reckoning on equity and justice both by using our existing assets—relationships, training platforms, programs, advocacy, communication, and marketing infrastructure—and creating new assets as levers for change.
We welcome you to join us as we lead this charge together!
Levers for Change: Operationalizing Advancing Health Equity and Justice
The AMA's long-term goal of advancing equity and justice is motivated by one key question: How do we ensure our efforts and innovations do not exclude, discriminate, exacerbate inequities, deny care, or cause harm?
Since our answer must be rooted in confronting the unequal distribution of power, advantage, and oppression, as well as the myths that undermine advancing and achieving equity and justice, the AMA has identified theories, levers, and logic for change.
The theories, levers, and logic for change offer opportunities for strategies and meaningful deliverables that visualize, normalize, and operationalize embedding equity to achieve health and social justice.
The theories of change consist of righting past injustices, challenging dominant narratives, centering marginalized voices and ideas, adopting anti-racism and intersectionality, and embracing public health frameworks which act upstream as we lead organizational transformation.
These theories support the 5 strategic approaches and work collaboratively with the levers for change. The levers consist of relationships, partnerships, and a network that aims to create intentional space, convening and/or providing supports to bring sustainable change that expands and amplifies our relationships with most marginalized groups.
The research, data use, and publications lever aims to conduct research that moves beyond description to action, moving from the problem space to the solution space.
Through the policy and advocacy lever, our role is to advocate that health equity be considered in all policies alongside others on behalf of these efforts.
The education, training, and tools lever has the power to influence the extent to which health equity and related concepts are embedded in medical education and ongoing training. In addition to external training, we will also focus on internal training and education of staff on health equity and anti-racism.
The programs and products lever aims to deliver timely and needed programming that benefits medical students, residents, physicians, and the communities they serve.
The communications and marketing lever aims to develop and distinguish the AMA's equity narrative in the national dialogue; identify the appropriate audiences and proper platforms for amplification; provide relevant tools and content that informs, educates, and empowers; and finally implement best practices for expanding visibility and dialogue that centers health equity, sustaining engagement and sparking action.
We welcome you to join us as we lead this charge together!