Our objective is to host three national, in-person conferences for Consumers United for Evidence-Based Healthcare (CUE), in 2019, 2020, and 2021, on the topic of ?Dissemination and Implementation?. We will apply a health equity lens to health services research findings and evidence-based information. To do this, we will pursue three aims: Promotion, education, and implementation. Through our conferences, we will promote the issue of equity to organizational members of CUE and others. We will enhance promotion by recruiting additional consumer groups that represent priority populations or that aim to promote health and healthcare issues for these underserved groups to CUE. We will educate our audience though our conferences, and they will, in turn, use the information to educate and advocate among their constituencies for enhanced quality and high value healthcare services. Because health and healthcare equity are directly related to a decrease in health disparities, conference presenters and topics will be drawn from the field of health services research. Finally, we will implement change by applying actions that increase equity in health services projects. For example, we will increase collaboration and consumer-health professional partnerships among CUE member organizations and healthcare societies through our Clearinghouse. There are many reasons to support the proposed conferences. First, CUE is a recognized leader in in patient and consumer engagement in evidence-based healthcare (EBHC). This is in part because CUE patients and consumer advocates are well-educated and have minimized potential conflicts of interest. Second, the annual CUE conference provides an unprecedented opportunity for learning, training and capacity-building for consumer organizations and their constituents. Third, the CUE staff at Johns Hopkins is well-suited to lead promotion, education and implementation efforts pertaining to health equity with CUE?s experienced Steering Committee. For example, we have deep and broad experience establishing partnerships that spotlight health equity, disseminating EBHC information to diverse groups, and leveraging resources to enable improvement in the outcomes, quality, access to, cost, and utilization of healthcare services.
Summary (3 sentences) Our objective is to host three national, in-person conferences in 2019, 2020, and 2021 (multiyear), on the topic of ?Dissemination and Implementation?; in this regard we will pursue three aims in the context of health equity: Promotion, education, and implementation. Impact will be measured by assessing whether: (1) the number of CUE member groups focused on priority populations has increased (promotion); (2) attendee's educational goals, and views on health equity, have been influenced by the conference (education); and (3) the number of requests and their fulfillment for CUE members to serve on advisory panels has been influenced by the conferences (implementation). For (3) we will collect information on opportunities for discussing and recommending equity actions in the panel context.
