Spotlight: Romana Hasnain-Wynia, PhD
The pressing question she has devoted her career to needs an answer:"What can be done to improve the quality of health care for all?" asks Romana Hasnain-Wynia, PhD and Director, Center for Healthcare Equity. The Center falls under the umbrella of the Institute for Healthcare Studies at the Feinberg School and is dedicated to ensuring equity and eliminating disparities in health care. That mission turns out to be a perfect match for the recently hired associate professor of research at Northwestern who brings years of experience and a steadfast approach to finding practical solutions that will ensure an accessible and fair health care system for all.
She is a nationally known expert, speaker and scholar on the issue of examining quality of care for vulnerable populations, including racial, ethnic and cultural minorities and individuals with limited English proficiency or low health literacy. All of these factors, as well as lower socioeconomic status, have been linked to a higher risk of receiving poor quality health care in America
Dr. Hasnain-Wynia has been the principal investigator on a number of national studies. Her new position allows her to draw on partnerships from her current and past work, while also building Northwestern's research and educational initiatives on equity. Her Center includes faculty from The Program in Communications and Medicine, the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Department of Preventive Medicine, the Office of Medical Education and other faculty from across the Feinberg School.
Evidence show that quality improvement efforts are more likely to reduce disparities in health care for minorities when providers keep track of patients' race, ethnicity, and language. But a big part of the difficulty in addressing disparities, says Dr. Hasnain-Wynia, has been that many institutions haven't been able to identify their patients correctly.
“To be very blunt," she says,"it's impossible to understand the root causes of disparities and target effective interventions if we can't even track the care we provide for specific patient populations." To help fix this basic problem, she has worked with The Joint Commission, the American Medical Association and the National Committee for Quality Assurance, among others, to urge health care organizations to collect information on patients' race, ethnicity, and primary language.
Tracking data isn't enough, though, she says."We need to link these data to quality measures to see if the care process breaks down for certain populations, and link them to patient-satisfaction measures to see if the patient experience is different or less than optimal for specific groups. If so, we need to find out why."
Under a grant from the Commonwealth Fund and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, she has worked locally with the Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services to add patient race/ethnicity and language data into their electronic health record system. This project has helped the clinics, which serve a diverse patient population, link patient demographic data to clinical performance measures for cancer screening and diabetes. The clinics are now using these linkages to identify disparities, provide more patient-centered care, and target their quality improvement efforts.
Prior to joining Northwestern, Dr. Hasnain-Wynia was vice president of research for the Health Research and Educational Trust, the research and education affiliate of the American Hospital Association. Before that, she was a senior research analyst for the Center for Health Economic Research, a Senior Program Faculty at Boston University's Carney Hospital, and a stay-at-home mom to her three boys. Dr. Hasnain-Wynia received her doctoral degree in health policy from Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management.
To date, the Pakistani-born native is most proud of the partnerships she has created and her relationships with health care leaders, her colleagues and the people she has mentored."We have made some progress and we are proud to point to our accomplishments," she says,"but we've barely seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to eliminating health care disparities and ensuring equity."
That's why she especially enjoys working with young physicians and post-doctoral fellows in health services research."I'll know I've been successful here if the work and mentoring I've done helps to create more health care leaders who understand that providing equitable care is fundamental to ensuring high quality care."
This page last updated Sep 13, 2011