We co-developed a national benchmarking assessment and digital “Action Hub” that has engaged over 400 healthcare organizations in standardizing and advancing racial equity. The project moved the industry from general statements of intent to a disciplined, data-driven pathway for systemic transformation.

Following the declaration of racism as a public health crisis in 2020, healthcare providers lacked a rigorous mechanism to move from awareness to coordinated action. Many organizations struggled with “readiness,” possessing the commitment to equity but lacking the governance and implementation architecture required to measure progress against peers. There was a critical need for a system-level tool that could ground equity strategy in operational reality across diverse hospital settings.

Do Tank’s Role:

• Implementation Architect: Translating a public health declaration into a functional accountability tool and digital collaboration infrastructure.
• Strategy Discipline Partner: Building a learning system that helps leaders manage the uncertainty of equity work with structured decision-making.
• Readiness Expert: Designing the “Action Hub” to ensure organizations only advanced ideas when institutional conditions supported real-world scale.

In partnership with UChicago Medicine and RUSH, and funded by the Commonwealth Fund, we designed a four-domain assessment—Our People, Our Patients, Our Organization, and Our Community. To ensure the strategy was an “active discipline” rather than a static document, we followed a structured implementation journey:

• Reflect & Focus: Teams used data reports to socialize their current state with leadership and select high-impact focus areas.
• Plan & Commit: Organizations developed “Equity Charters” and implementation timelines to align institutional priorities with community needs.
• Peer-Based Learning: We facilitated over five national and regional learning collaboratives, using “marketplace-style” sharing to reduce the risk of stalled or fragmented pilots.

This work culminated in the Racial Health Equity Progress Report, which has been adopted by over 400 organizations and recognized in the NEJM Catalyst. By providing execution infrastructure like digital toolkits and performance dashboards, we left behind a permanent capability for hospitals to mitigate data-driven gaps. The project successfully transitioned equity from an “innovation concept” to a core enterprise discipline, enabling growth grounded in community need and performance.

Real transformation happens when we treat strategy as a continuous learning system, not a one-time assessment. By aligning technology maturity with workforce readiness, we helped healthcare leaders move beyond dashboards to address the specific “implementation gap” in equity work. This project proves that when organizations have the right architecture to define the right problems, they can move with pace without losing the rigor required for sustained impact.