The HCM Division DEI Committee is pleased to announce the recipient of the inaugural Mosaic Paper Award: Sarah El-Azab for her paper, "Racialized Impacts of Interoperability of Race and Ethnicity Data on Equity-Focused Quality Improvement in an Emergency Department Collaborative Initiative". The award honors scholarship that advances health equity by generating meaningful theoretical and practical insights for health systems, organizations, and the communities, families, and patients they serve.
The Mosaic Award review committee selected Sarah's paper because it connected conceptual grounding (e.g., racialized decoupling) with rigorous analysis of clinical quality registry data from adult patients across Michigan emergency departments, yielding actionable implications for practice. A surprising finding was that race and ethnicity data were not interoperable across emergency departments participating in the same equity-focused quality improvement initiative. This limits the ability of both individual sites and the collaborative as a whole to aggregate and act on data to advance health equity.
The panel also recognized three outstanding nominated papers:
- Olivia Jung and colleagues examined innovation contests as a platform for partnering with patients and families to generate and implement ideas for improving health care services across diverse care settings. The team reported findings in both a 2025 conceptual paper in Pediatrics and a companion 2024 empirical paper in Medical Care.
- Cheryl Rathert and colleagues identified belonging, learning, and participation dimensions of patient psychological safety. Patients from different racial and ethnic groups were found to emphasize varying dimensions when describing good connections with providers in their 2024 publication in SSM–Qualitative Research in Health.
- Pavani Rangachari and colleagues introduced an extensive multi-level framework for advancing digital health equity in learning health systems in their 2025 publication in the International Journal for Equity in Health.
Congratulations to Sarah and all nominated authors for their important contributions to advancing equity-focused scholarship in health care management!
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Gordon Shen
Associate Professor
OHSU-PSU School of Public Health
Portland OR
4152502518
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