Doing Data for Equity? Cultural Schemas of Data and Diversity in Health Care Organizations

• In Event: 40817 - Health Care and Care Delivery: Medical Organizations, Providers and Patients

Abstract

How do organizations integrate work towards “equity” into their mission and practices? Institutional scholars have long documented how inequalities remain durable even in the face of reform, as official policies decouple from their implementation. Thus, organizational commitments to anti-racism or equity, for example, may fall short in practice due to lack of resources or institutional conflicts with an organization’s official values and goals. To begin to understand how such gaps arise, we examine how organizational members make sense of their work and the meaning constructions they deploy. We argue that an investigation of existing gaps between official policies and implementation needs to begin with a critical examination of cultural schemas. In this paper, we examine how members of health care organizations conceptualize needs, diversity, and inclusion to understand how organizational members make sense of equity.

We draw on qualitative data from 43 interviews with members from a range of healthcare organizations, including academic, large managed-care, and local safety-net health systems. Despite these varied settings, organizational members stressed the importance of racial data collection in bridging the needs of their organizations with broader institutional and field dynamics. Specifically, they converged on the value of data for 1) making the organizational missions more legible to internal and external actors; 2) providing evidence of doing “good” work; and 3) upholding the organization’s mission. Data collection on race serves as an alignment of means with ends, presenting the technical means of achieving critical organizational goals. By examining the meaning construction around needs, diversity, and inclusion, we show how the valuing of data allows actors to integrate equity into the conceptualization of their organization’s goals and the work that they do. We suggest that organizational members invoke data to convey both action and outcome as evidence of equity.

Authors

• Catherine Lee, Rutgers University-New Brunswick

• Taylor M Cruz, Northeastern University