The Next Step: Equal Care
Over a five-year period, the University of Iowa tracked
Aetna’s 1. 2 million Medicare patients ages 68 and older for
heart attacks and found that blacks were about 30
Diversity percent less likely than whites to receive life-saving
Initiatives Reach procedures and 22 percent less likely to be transferred
from a hospital that didn’t offer such procedures to one
Both Employees that did. Although experts agree that racial bias persists,
and Consumers w here a patient receives care also has an impact on
the quality of care. People in rural and urban disad-
Aetna’s commitment to diversity is apparent from the vantaged areas have higher mortality rates than
top down: women and people of color make up 33 and suburbanites. One reason is that hospitals in these
25 percent of its board of directors, respectively. The spirit regions have fewer resources.
of inclusion is pervasive throughout the company. Employ- Other studies have found that patients who
ees range in age from 18 to 89. Forty-three percent of new live in low-income areas are less likely to have
hires in 2006 were people of color. Aetna has an engaged LGBT health insurance and are, therefore, less likely
network with support from management. It’s not surprising that to receive preventative care and early diagno-
Aetna ranked No. 2 in the healthcare category of Fortune maga- sis/treatment. The AARP recently found that
zine’s Most Admired Companies. the lack of insurance and the cost of drugs
The transformation of the U.S. marketplace over the past two have led many Latinos and blacks to delay fill-
decades has driven Aetna to modify its business strategies to better ing prescriptions or to skip doses altogether,
address the needs of the fastest-growing segments of the popula- putting their health at greater risk.
tion. The company established a Target Growth Markets initiative to One way to increase the effectiveness of
develop business through multicultural/multilingual relationships, to healthcare and help close the disparities gap,
enhance market presence in targeted business communities and to suggest experts, is to encourage more di-
develop appropriate infrastructure, such as culturally relevant market- versity in clinical trials. In the past, most clini-
ing materials and open-enrollment campaigns. cal research has been based on the assump-
“If you interact with Aetna—no matter from what area of in- tion that testing on men is representative of
terest—our diversity initiatives are bound to touch you in some the entire species. Yet women and men can
way,” says Raymond J. Arroyo, Aetna’s chief diversity officer. respond to drugs and other interventions
For example, Aetna’s customers benefit from a range of programs differently. And while the law requires the in-
and products to meet widely varied needs. The organization is clusion of women and people of color for valid
committed to building relationships with minority- and women- analysis, trials rely largely on volunteers—and
owned businesses. And Aetna works to attract and retain a the average clinical trial participant is a white
diverse work force, one that fully understands the needs of its male between 18 and 40 years old.
customers and the communities where it does business. “Even though African Americans, Hispanics and
To that end, Aetna has set up a number of employee Asian Americans together represent more than
networks, which contribute to an inclusive environment one-third of the U.S. population, the number of mi-
by providing opportunities for employees to share their norities who participate in clinical trials declined from
culture, give back to their communities and network 12 percent in 1995 to less than 8 percent in 1999,”
with senior management. Some of these include reveals Diane Simmons, president and CEO of the
the African American, Work at Home and
Working Mothers’ Employee Networks.
Says Arroyo: “We’re focused on main- A major strategy in
taining an inclusive workplace where pro“viding healthcare to
all of our talented people can
do their best work.” minority and indigent patients
is to increase the number of
minorit y doctors.” —Dr. Louis W. Sullivan
