RISE for Equity

RISE for Youth: Equipping the Next Generation

Walé Elegbede, M.B.A., PMP President, Rochester NAACP and Director, Mayo Clinic RISE for Youth Faizza Omar RISE Up Youth Scholar Safa Sheikhibraihim RISE Up Youth Scholar We are all born with potential, but not all of us are given the opportunity to realize it. This is particularly true of young people of color. The RISE for Youth program seeks to bridge the gap, with a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Mayo Clinic and the NAACP (Rochester), designed to help underrepresented students find power against those odds. Featuring RISE for Youth program leader Walé Elegbede, and two rising star students, Host Lee Hawkins leads this candid conversation on the impact of representation on our youth’s success. “The beauty about this is, we're not going to decide; they’re going to decide what they want to do. So, if they want to work in the healthcare field, that's perfectly fine. We are going to support them. But if you want to, for example, become a restaurant owner or a small business, we're going to support you along that journey.” — Walé Elegbede "When you think about social determinants of health, education plays a critical role." — Walé Elegbede "I would say my biggest highlight is when I first started to put it on my institution, I noticed I could count all the black students on one hand. So in contrast to this program, the seeing, the diversity and people of color and having the same shared lived experiences with them, I feel seen and heard and empowered to grow as an individual just because there's a sense of...there's a sense of belonging." — Faizza Omar “Now I feel like I can truly be myself and thrive.” —Safa Sheikhibraihim

Pride and Pronouns: Caring for Trans and Nonbinary Patients

Fadi Adel, M.D. Clinician-Investigator Fellow, Mayo Clinic   Jennifer Koehler Research Technologist, Mayo Clinic   Patrick Decker-Tonnesen Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Advisor, Mayo Clinic Uncertainty over which pronouns to use with gender-diverse patients can spark anxiety for medical professionals and new acquaintances alike. But that anxiety is no match for the trauma felt by transgender, intersex, and other gender-diverse patients who deal with being misgendered every day. Host Lee Hawkins is joined by a panel of Mayo Clinic experts to unpack the medical importance of pronouns and why best practices in equity, inclusion, and diversity cannot be honored without using them properly. “To be honest, if I didn't have chronic health conditions where I do have to go to the doctor's office very often, I would probably avoid it, because no one likes to be misgendered. No one likes to feel that anxiety. I really don't like feeling that anxiety, especially since now that I'm farther along in doing things that do affect my gender, like wearing clothing that I feel affirms my gender, like surgery, my haircut in ways that affirm my gender. And then still being misgendered in a doctor's office really negates all that validation that I do have, even in my queer community, even within myself.” --Jennifer Koehler “My medical chart has my pronouns.  I have only been correctly gendered twice, where my pronouns are actually used in the medical setting. And this includes my doctor’s notes because as a patient, I do read my doctor's notes, and it usually feels like I'm not generally being seen.” --Jennifer Koehler “And when I was growing up, I was very much pushed towards being my assigned gender at birth. And so, for me, it was just feeling this deep incongruence with that and also with my body and how I was being perceived by other people.” --Jennifer Koehler

Is AI Biased? How Do We Fix It?

Maia Hightower, M.D., M.B.A., MPH Chief Digital Technology officer of the University of Chicago Medicine Ivor Horn, M.D. MPH Director, Health Equity & Social Determinants of Health, Google  Artificial Intelligence is full of technological and economic promise, but just like its creators, AI isn’t free from subconscious discrimination. As AI becomes more commonplace in the medical field, questions of whether racial bias will be mitigated or expanded in the future are omnipresent. The solution will depend on how much effort is put into making AI more equitable. Join Lee Hawkins, Drs. Maia Hightower and Ivor Horne as they delve into this new frontier. “Algorithmic bias is part of our history. It is part of the history of medicine, part of the history of the United States, and part of the history of our world, for many reasons.” --Dr. Maia Hightower “The real-world bias is in the real-world data.” --Dr. Maia Hightower “I literally went into medicine to transform the way people behave in, the way physicians behave in health care.” — Ivor Horn, M.D. MPH “And when I think about technology, it's all about, ‘how am I giving people more information, more access,’ so that when they walk through the doors of a health care system, like, they have the tools to say, ‘I know this, I understand this, this is my question for you, and this is what I expect of this health care system for me and for my family.’” — Ivor Horn, M.D. MPH “We know that data shows that more diverse teams have better outcomes. They're more, businesses are more profitable when they have more diverse teams sitting around the table. And it's really important not just to have the team but also give the team space to speak and confidence to have their voice and bring and be their full selves when they come to the room.” — Ivor Horn, M.D. MPH

Black Men in White Coats

Eddie Greene, M.D. Associate Professor of Medicine, Mayo Clinic  Lewis Roberts, M.B., Ch.B., Ph.D. Peter and Frances Georgeson Professor in Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Mayo Clinic Corey Shy, M.D. Instructor in Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine St. Louis    Only about three percent of the nation’s doctors are Black men, which lives in stark contrast to the overall Black population. In this episode, Lee Hawkins gathers a panel of Black men to examine this disparity and the unquestionable ripple effect of representation—or lack thereof. Listen as three accomplished Black men in white coats dissect the hurdles to medical school and representation in healthcare—from opportunity and mentorship to the power of seeing a doctor in Jordans.   “What we really need to do is expand that pool. And how we expand that pool is starting much earlier. So, getting to kids in elementary school, middle school." — Corey Shy, M.D.   "The big challenge is that (medical school) costs so much money. It’s an investment that's going to take a lot of time to see results from.” —Corey Shy, M.D.

Keeping Track: Data and Disparities

Felicity Enders, Ph.D.  Professor of Biostatistics, Mayo Clinic  As a biostatistician, Dr. Felicity Enders spends much of her time analyzing medical research and crunching the numbers we read about in newspapers and medical journals. In this interview, Dr. Enders reveals how this behind-the-scenes work is actually the frontline in addressing racism in healthcare. Join Lee Hawkins as he learns about the new data-collection approaches being used to track patient health over time and how they reveal the devastating “accelerated aging” effects of racism and chronic stress.   “We're getting better and better data all the time. We're really seeing improved measurement. We have amazing imaging. But while we have more clarity of the problem, we're not seeing that in terms of solutions for health equity. And we are seeing really tremendous differences in health, primarily by race, but also by other factors.” —Felicity Enders, Ph.D.   “We have a lot of data in the now, but we're not looking back over someone's lifetime to see what may be impacting what's happening in their health today. And that's really important because we see in research that people who have a lot of stress over their lifetime can have accelerated biological aging, meaning that their bodies at the cellular level are aging faster. And that leads to chronic health diseases that really can impact lives and experiences and bring about premature death. And it's very problematic.” —Felicity Enders, Ph.D.   “If you have a physician who has the time, they're trying to get a medical history, but that may not include the history of things that have happened outside of the person's medical experiences that could impact their stress over their lifetime.” --Felicity Enders, Ph.D.