GENDER QUEST: Mining employee data is a key step in addressing gender inequities in the health care workforce.

• Author: Dark, Stephen

Maia Hightower, M.D., M.P.H, M.B.A., went into medicine to address the health equity disparities in health care. University of Utah Health's Chief Medical Information Officer told her colleagues on a virtual employee forum in early June 2020, "I see our digital tools as a way to close the gap and not widen it."

Data can keep institutions accountable, said Hightower, who joined U of U Health in March 2019. One example of that is what she and nine women who work under her at the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) began pursuing in early 2020: developing a gender and race equity dashboard "to define through our data a targeted strategy to identify areas of inequity, including pay and representation on our leadership teams and our general workforce," she says.

Part of Hightower's drive to underscore within U of U Health the value of diversity and inclusion is developing leadership opportunities for women in its IT teams. She invested more than $70,000 in tuition and travel to support nine women from her division who signed up to participate in a Women in Leadership course organized by American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). It started in November with a two-day seminar in Washington D.C. The course involved developing a capstone project "to contribute to addressing the dearth of women in leadership," says Janice Davis, a U of U Health data warehouse analyst and course participant.

In early 2020, the cohort pitched several capstone ideas to Hightower, including one from Davis to develop an equity dashboard. It drew on her experience working for an Alaska Native-owned company that had ownership of their own data and their direction. "Why don't we do it here for women?" she wondered, using data "to see where we can improve."

Hightower signed off on Davis' idea, with U of U Health's Office of Health Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (OHEDI) co-sponsoring the dashboard. OHEDI Associate Vice President Jose Rodriguez, M.D., joined an oversight committee set up by Hightower to guide the team's dashboard implementation. Rodriguez told Hightower that his office manually generated a department-level equity dashboard assessing minority representation in the School of Medicine, albeit without access to the data, technology, and IT resources available within the CMIO division. They decided to merge the two dashboards.

Whether in terms of representation of women in the School of Medicine, or minorities, or both, U of U Health across the board was below...