Background

The need for Health Equity is recognized as a central challenge for the betterment of public health. The past three years have heightened the focus on the racial and ethnic inequities that have long existed across multiple social policy domains in Michigan and elsewhere across the country. The COVID pandemic has exacerbated those disparities, particularly in access to health and long-term care services, the quality of care, and health care outcomes.

In the Michigan Health Equity Challenge, Molina Healthcare will engage a competitively selected group of graduate students at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses in developing realistic community-based solutions to a set of health equity problems.  These problems may exist directly within the health, behavioral health, and long-term care arenas for children and adults of all ages and abilities. They may also arise from underlying determinants of health in other social policy domains (e.g., economic security, employment, housing, justice, education, and the environment) in urban, suburban or rural regions of the state.