Chelsea Clinton joins Brigham leaders to discuss health equity solutions at 2024 Women’s Health Luncheon
From left: Bharti Khurana, Giles Boland, David F. M. Brown, Chelsea Clinton, Hadine Joffe and Catherine Giess
The Brigham’s work to correct long-standing health inequities for women took center stage at the annual Women’s Health Luncheon on May 10, where keynote speaker Chelsea Clinton, DPhil, MPH, urged the audience to never give up fighting for a world where every woman, everywhere, has access to high-quality care.
“It’s so clear that when we invest in women, it’s not only women ourselves who flourish,” she said. “It’s also our communities and our countries that flourish, as well as our families.”
In conversation with journalist Lisa Hughes of WBZ-TV News, Clinton — a longtime public health advocate who serves as vice chair of the Clinton Foundation — lauded the Brigham’s focus on health equity and its dedication to eliminating barriers to care for patients locally and globally.
“I’m thankful there are people who are defining these challenges and architecting hypotheses about how best to solve them — and going about and doing the work of solving them,” she told the audience of more than 400 philanthropists, business leaders and women’s health advocates.
But while it’s important to celebrate progress, Clinton cautioned we should never mistake progress for success — or accept the status quo.
“The people who never give up in the pursuit of what they know is right, good, true, just and equitable are the ones I find most inspiring,” she said.
A record-breaking year
Now in its 18th year, the Women’s Health Luncheon supports and showcases the work of the Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health and Gender Biology, which strives to ignite change in women’s health by catalyzing research, advancing public policy and training the next generation of women’s health leaders. Held at the Westin Boston Seaport District, this year’s fundraiser was the most successful yet, raising more than $1 million — the highest fundraising total ever — to support the center’s mission.
“The Connors Center is a crown jewel of the Brigham and, really, of the whole Mass General Brigham system,” said David F. M. Brown, MD, president of Academic Medical Centers for Mass General Brigham. “The center plays a pivotal role — not only by shining a light on inequities but also by doing something about them.”
Hadine Joffe, MD, MSc, executive director of the Connors Center, reflected on the strides the center has made in correcting long-standing inequities in women’s health while acknowledging its work is far from over.
“We’ve pushed for policy changes that ensure women from all backgrounds are now represented in medical research,” she said. “We’ve worked to ensure that biological sex and the full spectrum of gender identity are studied in medical school. And we continue to pave the way for women to receive equitable care at the bedside and in the community.”
Breaking down barriers
These efforts were underscored by the luncheon’s featured faculty speakers: Brigham radiologists Catherine Giess, MD, deputy chair of Radiology, and Bharti Khurana, MD, MBA, founder and director of the Trauma Imaging Research and Innovation Center.
“What’s one of the most significant predictors of a women’s health?” Giess asked the audience. “Is it her family history? Her race or ethnicity? Her age? Or whether she has insurance? You may be surprised to learn that, in many cases, it comes down to her ZIP code.”
From left: Clinton in conversation with Lisa Hughes of WBZ-TV News at the 2024 Women’s Health Luncheon
Giess described how she uses a tool called the Area Deprivation Index (ADI) — which uses social determinants of health to measure where deprivation and affluence exist within communities — to help improve access to breast cancer screening.
“We know that women living in the highest ADI neighborhoods don’t have the same access to breast cancer screening and treatment than those in living in wealthier ZIP codes,” Giess said. “Because of that, they have worse survival rates — just because of where they live.”
Giess shared some of the ways in which she and her colleagues are removing the barriers these women face, such as providing mobile mammography and transportation vouchers to help patients who lack reliable transportation to the Brigham, and offering evening and Saturday breast imaging appointments for those with inflexible work schedules.
“All of this work is united by our common goal: to create health care systems where the supports and services patients need are built into the care,” Giess said.
Continuing the theme of breaking down barriers to care, Khurana shared her work to better detect and prevent intimate partner violence (IPV), defined as physical, sexual or emotional violence between current or former partners.
“One of the biggest misconceptions about IPV is that it only affects a small part of the population,” Khurana said. “The truth is that one in four women report experiencing physical violence by an intimate partner during her lifetime.”
And for every woman who reports IPV, there are countless others whose experiences go undetected and unreported, Khurana said, noting there are many reasons why patients are hesitant to report IPV to their healthcare providers — and many reasons providers are hesitant to ask.
“What can we do to change that?” Khurana asked. “And what can I, as a radiologist, do to help?”
The desire to help led Khurana to develop an innovative new tool called Automated IPV Risk Support, or AIRS. Using artificial intelligence, AIRS combines historical imaging and clinical data to create a model that automatically assesses the risk of IPV for every patient at their point of care. Khurana and her team have shown that AIRS can detect IPV four years before a patient would self-report with 85 percent sensitivity, its efficacy is expected to improve as they integrate more data.
“While this tool is completely unique to the Brigham, we plan to share it with health care settings around the country and across the globe,” Khurana said.