Lift Every Voice: Capturing and Intervening on Daily Experiences of Racism in Healthcare Settings

Lift Every Voice is an anonymous, easy-to-use digital platform for documenting employees’ experiences or observations of racism in the workplace. It has been piloted in the emergency department of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. For this project, Lift Every Voice will be implemented in two additional clinical departments of Penn Medicine, with the goal of eventually expanding the platform to all departments and to other health care systems as well. Major project activities include: 1) A series of pilots conducted using a rapid-cycle innovation approach. With the prototype already completed, the project team will seek to scale it to the entire Department of Medicine and an additional clinical department; 2) Visual representation of employees’ stories. The new platform will feature illustrations, comic strips, and animations to facilitate documentation and reporting; 3) Engagement of stakeholders and participants. These will include the Penn Urban Health Lab and the Center for Health Care Innovation, as well as on-the-ground employees; 4) Communications campaign. The project team will raise awareness of Lift Every Voice through email blasts, flyers, announcements, and other workforce-driven strategies; and 5) Interventions. Two to three interventions will be developed based on the stories collected, including one targeting departmental leadership and one that will create a staffwide public forum.