Empanelment Guide

Health equity, the principle that each person has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible, is enhanced by improving access to the conditions and resources that strongly influence health. The process of empanelment can help shape the resources and conditions that improve health equity, including promoting continuity and care team access, the availability of granular population data, and language and racial concordance between patients and providers. When exploring how to advance health equity through empanelment, practices may consider:

Use panel attribution to increase racial and linguistic concordance.

• The Urban Institute offers research and a rationale for including racial and linguistic concordance as part of empanelment: Racial, Ethnic, and Language Concordance between Patients and Their Usual Health Care Provider.

Conduct and analyze panel-level appointment data to design improvements to continuity and access.

• This brief by the American Hospital Association Center for Health Innovation provides guidance on how to use data to identify, investigate and intervene to address health disparities: Using Data to Reduce Health Disparities and Improve Health Equity.
• The Commonwealth Fund offers case studies that show how health care centers were able to use patient data to design interventions that improve care and reduce disparities: How New Mexico’s Community Health Workers Help Meet Patient Needs.

Act on panel data to design care teams that respond to the whole-person needs of that patient population, including consideration of their cultural and sociopolitical experiences and barriers to care.

• This toolkit from the Center for Care Innovations provides several tools to support care team design and functioning as they move toward health equity: CP3 Population Health Toolkit.
• University of Washington’s Center for Health Workforce Studies provides an exploratory review of the ways in which healthcare workers can be best utilized in team settings to achieve health equity: How are Health Care Workers Utilized in Health Equity Interventions? An Exploratory Review.