Rated High, Treated Different: Rethinking Public Ratings to Advance Equity in Medicare Home Health: Shekinah Fashaw-Walters, PhD

This talk examines how publicly reported quality ratings can obscure inequities in Medicare home health care and presents new approaches to measuring and advancing equity — ensuring that all older adults, regardless of race, income, or neighborhood, have fair access to high-quality care at home.

Shekinah A. Fashaw-Walters, PhD, is the John Russell Dickson, MD Presidential Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and a research associate at the Penn Population Aging Research Center. Dr. Fashaw-Walters is a health services researcher whose program of research focuses on understanding the inequities in aging while elucidating the roles of racism, place, and policies in the generation and reinforcement of health inequities within aging care access, quality, and outcomes. Her NIH-funded work has been published in numerous high-impact journals and featured in several national news outlets. Dr. Fashaw-Walters is AcademyHealth's 2024 Alice S. Hersh Emerging Leader, a 2024 NIMHD Health Disparities Research Institute Scholar, a 2022 NIA Butler-Williams Scholar, a former faculty scholar with the NIA IMPACT Collaboratory, an Editorial Board member at The Gerontologist, and a member of AcademyHealth’s Board of Directors. Dr. Fashaw-Walters earned her PhD in health services research from Brown University, a Master of Science in public health from UNC Chapel Hill's Department of Health Policy and Management in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, and her Bachelor of Science from the University of Central Florida.