The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report concluded that the United States witnessed substantial improvements in several quality and patient safety measures. Despite this progress, our nation continues to underperform on other measures, and social determinants of health continue to have great impact on whether individuals and their communities experience worse health outcomes relative to other individuals and communities.1

JHQ issued a special call for manuscripts, intending to curate a collection of quality-improvement initiatives and research studies that illustrate successful strategies for improving care and the health of underserved or marginalized populations. Our call for papers was deliberately broad. We wanted papers that addressed any underserved group and could focus on care provided at any point along the care continuum. We also were very clear that papers should focus on solutions and not simply describe the existence of a disparity.

The articles included in this special issue provide valuable lessons for those working to improve health equity. For example, while there is an urgent call to better understand the potential for team-based care to reduce health disparities,2 an interprofessional care clinic holds promise for addressing readmissions among patients with heart failure.3 Another paper demonstrated that it is possible to screen in an inpatient setting for food insecurity.4 This could further enhance the efforts of the interprofessional heart failure clinic to provide food for recently hospitalized patients.3

The articles in this issue also provide reminders that it is important to consider the policy, organizational, and educational environments within which health systems operate. From a policy standpoint, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), through its Accountable Care Communities, set an actionable framework for encouraging partnerships with community-based organization in the development of strategies to improve health equity.5 At the organizational level, health systems that are intentionally focused on healthy equity for its lesbian, gay, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) patients can actually improve the experiences of care for all of their patients.6 Finally, we learned that educators will need to focus on helping learners translate new knowledge about population health into actionable strategies.7

We received over 30 submissions in response to our call for papers. However, many of the papers simply focused on describing disparities, and we received relatively few papers that included well-executed programs or initiatives aimed at providing better care for populations at risk for poor outcomes. It is clear that society needs more research and quality-improvement initiatives focused specifically on strategies to reduce health disparities and improving health equity.

There are many frameworks that can support the advancement of this work. The National Institutes of Health's Strategic Plan for 2021-25 prioritizes the scientific understanding of the causes of health disparities and the development and testing of interventions to address and overcome disparities.8 Moreover, the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities provides a comprehensive framework, including domains of influence ranging from biology to healthcare systems and levels of influence from the individual to societal level, to ground and guide science to advance and optimize health outcomes for individuals, families, communities, and populations.9

Beyond discovery and generation of new knowledge, it is imperative that we accelerate the translation and dissemination of this knowledge to practice. Indeed, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute put forth their national priorities for health, including achieving health equity, through progress toward integrated learning health systems, increased evidence for existing interventions and emerging innovations in health, enhanced infrastructure to accelerate patient-centered outcomes research, and advancing the science of dissemination, implementation, and health communication.10 Ultimately, as demonstrated by the papers in this volume, the success of these ambitious national strategic plans is determined in local communities and clinical settings. Dedicated individuals and interdisciplinary and interprofessional teams leveraging Federal, state, jurisdictional, institutional, and educational resources to support local quality, safety, improvement, and dissemination and implementation science initiatives will determine our collective success.

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