Following a storytelling exercise to identify a racial health disparity, members of the Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative (GHDC)—founded by the community to include public health researchers and healthcare professionals—learned each of their lives were touched by breast cancer.

GHDC approached Cone Health Cancer Center (CHCC) to partner on reducing racial disparities in cancer care. While physicians acknowledged societal racism, some felt they treated all patients equally. However, GHDC found differences in care by race in CHCC’s data, helping to get the institution engaged.

Together and with the University of Pittsburgh, they designed a system-based set of healthcare interventions which ultimately improved treatment completion rates of early-stage, Black breast and lung cancer patients. The intervention used anti-racism principles (transparency and accountability) at the interpersonal, organizational, and community levels.

As a result, the previous 7% treatment completion rate gap between Black and White patients closed to a 1% treatment completion difference. Completion rates improved for all patients regardless of race.

“Our partners realized that bad health outcomes are not necessarily about patients being noncompliant or clinicians not caring, but are due to failures on the systemic level,” said one GHDC member. “This realization had ripple effects throughout the organization.”