Encoding Equity Change Package: Clinical and Specialty Societies

November 2025

The Encoding Equity Change Package: Clinical and Specialty Societies is a tool to support the adoption of practices that explicitly recognize how the use or misuse of race and ethnicity may help, harm, or have a neutral effect on health outcomes for minority populations. This change package is not a step-by-step roadmap but rather a menu of options that any professional society, regardless of stage, size, or specialty, can implement to reduce bias in guidance documents and practice.

There are numerous strategies outlined in this tool, none of which must happen linearly. Organizations may find themselves at different stages of the process and may start and progress throughout this work non-sequentially. Users of the change package are encouraged to choose a sensible starting point in the context of their organization. Incremental changes are necessary to advance in this work. Further, there is not a one size fits all approach to mitigating harm and bias in medicine and research, though we hope your organization can identify with the broad strategies outlined in this resource.

We recommend piloting the recommendations in this change package on a small scale before expanding them across your entire organization. Organizations without the bandwidth or resources to implement this broadly across their society may choose to support individual investigators through grant mechanisms or staff support. These strategies can enable professional societies to take steps toward advancing health equity in guidelines and algorithms.