Driving Health Equity in the Workplace
Session seating is first come, first served. Thank you for your cooperation.
The American Heart Association's CEO Roundtable - a leadership collaborative of nearly 50 CEOs committed to improving the health of companies they lead and communities they serve - have developed a set of guiding principles and actionable strategies to organizations on their journey toward health equity. This session will deepen understanding of how these strategies are working in practice, what tools and support employers need, the impact of policies, and what implementation looks like. It will also help identify the gaps that exist and the resources needed.
Learning Objectives:
- Attendees will walk away with how to define and deploy effective workplace strategies to work towards health equity in the workplace.
- Attendees will walk away with understanding the measurable impact that health equity can have in the workplace.
- Attendees will walk away with being better equipped to understand the lived experiences of employees.
Sponsored by American Heart Association
Elizabeth Baca
Dr. Elizabeth Baca is a clinician strategist at Deloitte providing systems thinking and insights to health care and life science clients to support care delivery innovation to foster total health and well-being recognizing health equity and sustainability are central to this work. She helps strategically address ESG issues in a comprehensive way.
She served in both administrations of Governor Brown and Governor Newsom, first as Senior Health Advisor and then Deputy Director in the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research for California. She has worked on a variety of projects to foster health through land use planning, systems change, food systems, precision health, precision medicine and big data. Much of her work is about connecting the dots; she loves working across sectors to foster participant-centered design and collaboration. A significant part of her work is aligning win-wins for projects that offer co-benefits particularly in addressing the social, economic, and environmental factors that impact health. As an example, she has done work to improve health through climate mitigation and adaptation projects. In her role with California, she has provided leadership and guidance to several initiatives including The California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine, the Global Climate Action Summit, and the California Health Care Climate Alliance.
Dr. Baca has served in several national and global advisory roles including with the Urban Land Institutes Health Leaders Program, an advisor to FoodSystem6, a food system accelerator, and as a contributor and member of the Biotech Futures Council for the World Economic Forum. She has been a contributing author on several publications including the National Academy of Sciences (formally Institute of Medicine) Consensus Committee for Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity, Demystifying Big Data and Machine Learning for Health Care, and Precision Medicine: An Action Plan for California.
Previously, she served on the General Pediatric Faculty at Stanford Medical School and directed the Community Pediatric and Child Advocacy Rotation.
Dr. Baca studied health policy at Universidad Simon Bolivar in Venezuela. She completed her Master in Public Administration at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and her Doctorate of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Baca completed her residency in the Pediatric Leadership for the Underserved (PLUS) program at University of California, San Francisco.
Maria Dee
Maria Dee is currently the executive director for workforce wellbeing in the national Human Resources department at Kaiser Permanente. Maria is responsible for providing strategic direction, leadership and expertise in developing and implementing an enterprise-wide well-being program in support of Kaiser Permanente's aim to have the most thriving workforce in healthcare.
She is accountable for the national workforce wellness (Healthy Workforce) program; mental health and wellness strategy and programs including the Employee Assistance Program; and guiding the strategy for all the other components of Kaiser Permanente's wellbeing model for employees: career, financial, healthy relationships, and community involvement.
Under her leadership, Kaiser Permanente adopted industry leading actions such as policies on healthy catered food and healthy activities during the workday. She has led efforts to drive enterprise-wide culture change to help employees thrive in the workplace. Maria has also helped Kaiser Permanente receive national recognition as a leader in workforce health and well-being.
