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Chief Health Equity Officer, Indiana University Health
Honoree, Physician
In addition to her long-standing OB/GYN practice at Indiana University Health and Eskenazi Health, Dr. Brownsyne Tucker Edmonds, a clinical and health services researcher at the IU School of Medicine, has also made a name for herself both locally and nationally for her work to advance social justice in medicine and promote more and better-quality care for underserved populations.
After years of studying these problems, she’s developing solutions for them as vice president and chief health equity officer at IU Health, where she focuses on creating concrete, research-based ways to promote equal care for the diverse communities and patients IU Health serves.
“I took the job because it felt like a chance to make an impact on a greater scale than when you’re working on one grant at a time in the research space,” Edmonds said. “What’s really exciting is being able to bring that research and data lens to the way we approach implementing equitable care for the state of Indiana.”
As chief health equity officer, Edmonds established IU Health’s Office of Health Equity Research and Engagement.
The office’s programs include the Indianapolis Health Equity Access, outReach & Treatment (iHEART) Collaborative and the Race, Ethnicity, Language (REaL) data initiative.
The collaborative is a cardiovascular health initiative focused on reducing health inequities that contribute to overall heart disease for individuals in three medically underserved areas of Indianapolis: Meadows/Martindale-Brightwood, the United Northwest Area/Riverside and the near-southeast side. Separately, the REaL data initiative aims to collect patients’ race, ethnicity and preferred language information so IU Health can better understand the health needs of its patients and the communities it serves.
Edmonds has studied social justice and equitable health care (or, more often, the lack thereof) for years. In addition to her medical training, she holds a master’s in public health in quantitative methods from Harvard School of Public Health, and another master’s in health policy research from the University of Pennsylvania.
She chose OB/GYN as her medical specialty because her father was a gynecologist, and she also grew up observing the problems underserved communities faced getting equitable care.
“He loved the work he did, and I think that ended up being contagious,” Edmonds said. “Also, dealing with equity and disparities in underserved communities was always part and parcel of his practice. I felt like it was part of our responsibility to deal with such problems, and I’m privileged now to be able to do so.”
Over the years, she’s studied such equity-related health topics as shared decision-making, patient-provider communication, clinical ethics, reproductive justice and health disparities. She’s finding ways to implement what she’s learned from her field studies, ranging from assessments of the differences in treatment and care for very premature infants to gaps in the control of hypertension between white and Black patients.
In the case of hypertension treatment, Edmonds contemplates relatively simple, straightforward strategies to fix long-standing problems. For instance, providing patients who lack reliable transportation with their own blood pressure cuffs, so they can take their own readings and text them to health care providers rather than face an onerous office visit.
“My focus is about how we mitigate inequity using a rigorous and patient-engaged approach,” she said.•
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