EP347: Rolling Out Healthcare Initiatives That Actually Get Uptake With the Populations You Aim to Serve, With Ian Tong, MD, About the Black Community Innovation Coalition

In Episode 347, Stacey Richter talks with Ian Tong, MD, chief medical officer at Included Health, about the Black Community Innovation Coalition — a new virtual-care program formed by Walmart, six other employers, and Included Health, aimed at combating health disparities among African American workers. The conversation covers how the coalition leverages existing employee resource groups (ERGs) to build engagement directly into program design, rather than treating engagement as an afterthought or a separate "marketing" function bolted on after the fact.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

✅ What the Black Community Innovation Coalition is, and which partners are behind it

✅ Why a one-size-fits-all approach to employee health benefits isn't adequate or complete

✅ How the coalition uses existing ERGs (employee resource groups) as a channel to build trust and engagement

✅ Why the best practice is building the engagement mechanism into a program's design from the start, not treating it as an afterthought

✅ Why virtual primary care matters for self-insured employers, and why low-value encounters are something the system can't afford

WHY THIS MATTERS

If you take a one-size-fits-all approach to your employees, that is not going to be adequate or complete. So often engagement is treated as a separate, sequential "marketing" function bolted onto a program after it's already built. The Black Community Innovation Coalition's approach — building engagement into the design itself, using channels like ERGs that already carry trust — is worth considering for anyone trying to improve health equity and outcomes for populations the healthcare system doesn't serve well.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

EP338 with Nikki King, DHA: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

EP295 with Rebecca Etz, PhD: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Other Apps

=== LINKS ===

🔗 Show Notes with all mentioned links: Episode Page

🔗 Healthcare Industry Acronyms and Terms

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00:00 Introduction.

04:33 What is the Black Community Innovation Coalition?

05:06 Who are the partners behind the Black Community Innovation Coalition?

06:23 How is the Black Community Innovation Coalition focusing on patients?

08:05 "If you take a one-size-fits-all approach to your employees, that is not going to be adequate or complete."

08:56 How the Black Community Innovation Coalition is incorporating engagement into its core foundation.

13:18 "There's a great deal of hesitancy around engaging care, and there's a high level of avoidance."

15:26 EP338 with Nikki King, DHA.

16:34 "The technology is not making that experience worse. It's a bad experience, and it's broken already."

23:27 "I feel very strongly that everyone should probably have a virtual primary care clinician."

27:20 EP295 with Rebecca Etz, PhD.

28:15 "We really want to pay attention to that encounter being the best encounter possible because that … might be the only chance you get to engage that patient."

29:00 Why is virtual care important for self-insured employers?

32:08 "We cannot afford to have low-value encounters."