Black, Indigenous, and people of color are underrepresented in the physician ranks, which may lead to health disparities, especially for Black patients.
That lack of diversity among physicians starts at the medical school level—prompting Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health, one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the US, and the Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) in Atlanta to create a 10-year, $100 million physician workforce diversity partnership called the More in Common Alliance. The partnership aims to increase the number of training opportunities at CommonSpirit hospitals across the country for Black physicians, as well as address both the ongoing provider shortage and the need for more culturally competent providers.
“This 10-year partnership is the first nationwide initiative between two of the country’s leading health organizations to address the underlying causes of health inequities, including underrepresentation of Black physicians,” MSM President and CEO Valerie Montgomery Rice said at a Senate committee roundtable in May. “This partnership lays the foundations for patients to have more access to Black clinicians and for Black medical students and graduates to gain community-based experience.”
Studies show that patients report better outcomes when healthcare professionals from similar backgrounds treat them. To that point, Black patients living in counties with Black primary care physicians have longer lifespans than those without, Stat reported.
Patients with hypertension or symptoms of cardiovascular disease are more likely to adhere to medication guidelines when treated by a doctor of the same race, a 2020 study by New York University and New York City health department researchers found.
The researchers suggest that “health policy should fund programs that support the recruitment and retention of a wide diversity of students and faculty to increase the level of concordance in patient-clinician encounters.”
That’s what the More in Common Alliance wants to do: establish training sites for Black and Indigenous medical students as well as those from other diverse backgrounds at CommonSpirit hospitals.
Regional training hubs
So far, the partnership has established three undergraduate medical training sites in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Lexington, Kentucky; and Seattle, Washington—with plans to create additional graduate medical programs in Santa Cruz, Ventura County, and Bakersfield in California.
These first phase sites were chosen “based upon community need and the ability to launch programs rapidly in response to this vital need,” the then-CommonSpirit CEO Lloyd Dean said in a 2021 statement announcing the locations.
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For example, the Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle “already [has] several residencies and a long history of training folks after medical school,” and the partnership there works to train healthcare providers to better serve the Black, Alaska Native, and Pacific Islander populations in the region, More in Common Alliance’s Chief Administrative Officer Veronica Mallett told Healthcare Brew.
Fourth-year MSM medical students will participate in four-week clinical rotations at one of the three undergraduate training sites. One of the alliance’s goals is to “forever remove the excuse that we can’t find [Black medical professionals] to hire,” Mallett said.
Since August 2022, Virginia Mason has hosted three new MSM students each month to complete rotations in urology, anesthesiology, and systems-based practice, which introduces students to the Virginia Mason Production System. At CHI Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, medical students and physician assistant students have completed rotations in specialities such as emergency medicine and neurology since September 2021.
“We provide a welcoming, inclusive, supportive environment for our learners, such that not only would they want to stay for their after medical school training, but that they would want to be part of CommonSpirit and to be part of our workforce going forward,” Mallett said.
Improving the pipeline
The majority of Black doctors come out of MSM and the three other historically Black medical schools in the country, but they have limited training capacity, according to MSM. About 10% of new medical school students in academic year 2022–2023 were Black, up from 9.5% in 2020–2021, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.
The partnership will allow MSM to train more medical students and increase its student population size by 6% every five years. It aims to add at least 300 physicians from underrepresented backgrounds to the workforce each year.
“The whole idea is that [the physicians] would then stay in that community and serve that community, [helping] people who have not had an opportunity to be cared for by someone who really shares their language, shares their culture, understands their lived experience—that is the ultimate goal,” Mallett said.