Institute for Health Equity Research

The Community Engagement Core works toward optimizing the health and lives of groups most significantly and unjustly impacted by systemic inequities through representative and durable community partnerships. We believe that authentic and meaningful community engagement is critical to addressing the most pressing health disparities.

Community-Based Participatory Research
Community-based participatory research is a process that involves diverse community members in all phases of the research process. We offer training for community members and leaders to learn how to conduct community-based participatory research that matters to them and link participants with researchers for continued learning and collaboration. Our community-based Participatory Research Hub includes community-identified and vetted resources to support community-engaged research projects.

RiseBoro Storytelling Event “Hope Bodega”
The Institute hosted an intergenerational storytelling event at RiseBoro, a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn. Dubbed as "Hope Bodega", the innovative participatory project is an assemblage of shared experiences, designed to kindle a sense of connection and resiliency among community members. At its heart lies a simple yet powerful concept: inviting individuals to bring forth cherished objects and mementos from their personal spaces carrying a unique significance that embody joy, hope, strength, and love. Bodegas are special to New York City, and to those of us who call New York home. To showcase and more widely share the profound impact of the experiences, places, and wisdom shared during the event, an upcoming exhibit is being planned. “Hope Bodega” will travel to other neighborhoods and spaces across New York City.

The Data Science and Research Core investigates and addresses how biological, social, financial, neighborhood, and health care factors have contributed to poor health outcomes for diverse racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and physically disadvantaged groups, across a wide range of diseases and conditions. Key initiatives include using data on millions of people to understand how to best improve detection and control of high blood pressure; the association between genes and air pollution in the well-known disparities in chronic kidney disease; and the different impacts of COVID-19 on different communities. Current work includes:

Interventions to Eliminate Disparities
Many factors determine how long and how well people live. The Institute for Health Equity Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is shattering the traditional silos researchers operate in to elucidate reasons for, and address, disparities. By building, using, and sharing user-friendly and reliable datasets, we are learning and addressing how these factors influence health.

Transforming Clinical Trials to Address Disparities
Too often, the populations most impacted by poor health are not included either as intellectual partners in, or as participants of, interventions to improve health. The Institute for Health Equity Research is changing that. We are leading several national and international efforts in which diverse community members and advocates help select interventions that address root causes of disparities to improve health. With community, industry, academic leaders, and funders, we are ensuring the populations we enroll in studies are fully representative populations.

The Healthcare Delivery Science Core investigates how differences in access to healthcare and the quality of care provided impacts health outcomes for socially, economically and physically disadvantaged populations and works toward eliminating disparities in how diseases are diagnosed and treated. Our recent work includes the following initiatives.

Developing Equity Dashboards
Lynne Richardson, MD and Nina Bickell, MD along with other equity experts across the health system, are founding members of the Mount Sinai Health Outcomes Data Assessment team that provides oversight, guidance and technical support to design dashboards to monitor the quality of care received by the diverse people receiving care across the Mount Sinai Health System and to implement interventions to assure equitable outcomes for all patients.

Eliminating Bias from Physician and Nursing Notes
Institute leaders Carol Horowitz, MD, MPH, and Lynne Richardson, MD, have partnered with the Quality Leadership Council on the Factual, Affirming, Informative and Respectful (FAIR) Documentation initiative, which seeks to eliminate negative descriptors and stigmatizing language from provider notes in electronic health records and educate clinicians on how to use FAIR language when writing about patients. This effort incorporates the latest technology, including artificial intelligence to identify inappropriate language, and engages patients, clinicians, staff and health systems leaders to implement solutions.

Improving Linguistic Equity
Researchers from the Institute for Health Equity Research are partnering with the office of the Chief Medical Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System to identify and eliminate disparities in outcomes for patients with a language preference other than English and to implement improvements in language interpreter services.  

Eliminating Harmful, Biased Clinical Algorithms
Competently caring for diverse populations requires knowledge of group-specific data on risks and outcomes; evidence-based clinical decision tools based on the best available data can facilitate equitable care. However, inappropriately using race in clinical algorithms based on flawed evidence has caused harm. IHER’s work includes improving outcomes by promoting race-free calculators that have improved decision-making calculations regarding when people are eligible for kidney transplant, and for guiding pregnant patients who previously delivered by Cesarean Section.

Eliminating Cancer Disparities
Through a citywide collaborative of academic institutions and community advocates, funded by Stand Up to Cancer!, we are working to achieve equity in cancer clinical trials by increasing the proportion of diverse people in cancer clinical trials.

Investigating Practice Segregation in Ambulatory Care
With NIH funding, we are reviewing ambulatory visit data for 12 million patients getting care from numerous medical centers in New York City to assess whether there are differences in care and outcomes in practices that care for people with different types of insurance and from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

The Research Workforce Core works toward transforming the composition and focus of Icahn Mount Sinai’s research workforce to reflect the diversity of our society and ensure that all research is conducted through an equity lens. Our recent work includes the following initiatives.

Health Disparities Research Consultation Service
The Health Disparities Research Consultation Service offers support to Icahn Mount Sinai researchers who are currently working on or are planning to conduct research involving diverse populations or disparities to encourage and enhance health equity science across the Mount Sinai Health System, and to foster long-term collaborations across departments, institutions, and community partners.

Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Training Program
The Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research (iCORE) Training Program is a nine-week summer program that provides hands-on and classroom research training for undergraduate, post-baccalaureate, medical, nursing, and graduate students to gain valuable research skills and clinical experience in a collaborative and interdisciplinary environment. The iCORE program is a collaborative effort between the Institute for Health Equity Research, the Department of Emergency Medicine, and the Center for Nursing Research and Innovation.

Mental Health Equity Research Group
The Mental Health Equity Research group is focused on promoting equitable access to culturally relevant mental health treatment. This research group, led by Sidney Hankerson, MD, MBA, specializes in meeting people where they are through partnerships with churches, barbershops, youth sports leagues, and other community-based agencies. They integrate principles of community engagement and implementation science.

Geospatial Health Research Lab
Directed by Andrew Maroko, PhD, the Geospatial Health Research Lab’s primary goal is to provide Institute researchers, and the broader Mount Sinai community, access to methodological and theoretical expertise in health geography, spatial analysis, and geographic information science for the study of population health. These services include simple map making and geo-visualization, neighborhood characterization using robust spatial approaches such as dasymetric disaggregation and expert systems, exposure and accessibility estimates, spatial statistics such as cluster detection, and the formulation of “spatial” or “geographic” hypotheses to be tested.

We also collaborate with the Mount Sinai Scientific Computing and Data Group to advise them on best practices for including neighborhood-level social detriments of health in Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. Including these types of data into EHRs can help researchers more easily incorporate contextual social determinants into their work and projects.

Immigrant, Cultural, and Linguistics Studies Research Group
This research group focuses on investigating language equity. The Mount Sinai Health System serves one of the most diverse patient populations in the world, making the consistent use of appropriate language interpreter services (LIS) imperative.