Advancing health equity: Where to begin

In a conversation with Medical Economics, Earl Stewart Jr., MD, FACP, discusses how health care organizations and clinicians can begin identifying and addressing bias in their practices. Speaking at the ACP Internal Medicine Meeting 2025 in New Orleans, Stewart emphasized the importance of recognizing implicit bias as a first step toward equity.

“We find that a recognition of implicit bias is important to help combat some of the systemic inequities that exist in the delivery of health care in the United States,” Stewart said. “We’re all sometimes hard pressed to understand the importance of how implicit bias may impact our everyday work, but in medicine it’s extremely important because there’s an abundance of evidence and data that show that if we don’t mitigate those biases as patient-facing clinicians, it can certainly impact a patient’s outcome.”

Stewart urged health systems, hospitals and private practices to lead with awareness, education and training. “It has to really start at the top of the chain,” he said. “Leveraging all kinds of knowledge that’s available and evidence that’s available on the topic is extremely important.”

He recommended implementing cultural competency, SOGI (sexual orientation and gender identity), and other training programs to help clinicians provide more equitable, patient-centered care. “Those are some of the ways that I think that we can tackle those biases as they pertain to how we practice patient-centered care,” he said.