Dr. Rabiah Dys Featured in Pharmacy Angle

August 2024

Pharmacists play a pivotal role in making healthcare more equitable.

While health systems have made strides in this area, Rabiah Dys, PharmD, believes there’s an opportunity to continue to innovate. She encourages healthcare leaders to think differently about how we can continue to advance health equity.

Dr. Dys, Senior Vice President of Clinical Services at CPS, oversees clinical programming for our clinicians and partner facilities. She and her team are responsible for helping health systems integrate new approaches to improving patient outcomes.

“Health equity is such an important topic,” Dr. Dys recently explained to Pharmacy Angle, a Health Connect Partners publication. “However, most people think about it as an intangible concept.”

But it’s not.

Health equity improvement: Big thinking and small steps for systemic change

Over the past several years, Dr. Dys and her team have established and introduced numerous initiatives to advance health equity across our network. Their focus includes:

1. Health literacy: Raising awareness about what it means to be health literate.
2. Health-related social needs: Creating better systems and workflows for capturing patients' unmet HRSNs, which can impact health equity.

"Health equity is really trying to understand what a disease means for a particular person," she continued. "It's about incorporating the little — but important — things into our workflow to ensure our patients understand the healthcare system and how to navigate and use it."

With health literacy, we’re beginning at the basics like communication and assumptions,” Dr. Dys said.

Under her guidance, CPS’ pharmacy teams have implemented universal precautions for health literacy, treating each patient as if it’s their first time in a healthcare setting.

This approach ensures that every interaction starts with the same baseline, free from assumptions about a patient’s health literacy.

This small workflow change can have a significant impact on outcomes, says Dr. Dys.

“We’re chunking and checking,” she explained. “We’re chunking health information during an interaction in a way that’s understandable. Then, we’re checking in with the patient to ensure they understand. We course correct, if needed. It sounds simple, but it’s a step often missed in workflows."

How the industry's first health equity and systems thinking fellowship is advancing health equity

These small steps matter in making our healthcare system more equitable. That’s the thinking behind the CPS’ team’s health literacy work, which has been brought to life through CPS’ Pharmacy Fellowship in Health Equity and Systems Thinking (HEST).

The Pharmacy Fellowship in Health Equity and Systems Thinking is the industry's first post-doctoral fellowship focused on promoting health equity across the care continuum.

It positions graduates to advocate for and improve health equity using systems thinking and community resources-focused approaches. A key part of the fellowship’s curriculum — systems thinking — may help healthcare leaders make the concept of health equity more tangible.

"Systems thinking requires us to climb to the balcony, look down, and see the connected issues creating a whole problem," Dr. Dys explained. "At CPS, we aim to teach people to think globally, understanding the trends creating systemic issues [like health inequity]."

Now its second year, the fellowship is already delivering meaningful results.

1. Developing an assessment tool to help pharmacy teams improve health equity, especially in the areas of health literacy and trauma-informed care.
2. Conducting longitudinal research studies evaluating intervention-based efforts in addressing health equity.
3. Creating and advancing CPS’ health equity certificate program for preceptors and pharmacy leaders.

What's next?

Dr. Dys says the team will continue to focus on pharmacy-led solutions addressing specific and systemic health equity challenges. Ultimately, the goal is to help every patient get the care they need, want, and deserve to live well.

“Health equity isn’t just about speaking the same language,” she said. “We’re looking at our patients as whole people. To us, advancing health equity is trying to understand what a disease means for a person, family, and community.”

Watch the full interview.