Northwestern’s ADVOCATE Center, a learning health system for improving health equity for LGBTQ+ patients and people with HIV, first launched in March, expanding upon their program that began in 2022.
Despite the quashing of at least 10 NU research projects related to LGBTQ+ health and more than $125 million in funding cuts toward LGBTQ+ healthcare by the National Institutes of Health, NU’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing successfully launched the center.
ADVOCATE co-Founder and co-Director Lauren Beach said the center aims to create an affirming and safe space for sexual and gender minority individuals by ensuring members in the LGBTQ+ community have full access to individualized medicine that Northwestern Medicine has to offer.
“It takes a cultural change,” said ADVOCATE’s other Founder and Director, Sumanas Jordan. “It takes finding a lot of competent providers and chipping away a patient at the time to address those disparities. It is one patient at a time.”
ADVOCATE research assistant Anthony Engle said the organization gathered sexual orientation and gender identity data from the clinics of their partners — such as NM and Howard Brown Health — focusing on determining which populations aren’t being served. ADVOCATE then works with its advocacy partners, such as Brave Space Alliance, to determine how to best implement solutions.
With this data, ADVOCATE can highlight existing disparities. One of ADVOCATE’s studies examined the disparity between the majority of cisgender women who had met mammogram clinical practice recommendations for breast cancer screening, in contrast to less than half of transgender people meeting the same, Beach said.
The ADVOCATE Center has four core pillars — research, education, practice and policy — that ensure its research gets implemented into practice. Engle said there’s a large gap between the research performed to determine the most effective standards of care and what is actually practiced in clinics.
“ADVOCATE really wanted to close that gap, but then also make it a full circle gap by ensuring that at the federal level and at the state level, these policies are codified,” Engle said.
Through their prior experience as an attorney, Beach also regularly meets with and testifies for advocacy groups, like Pride Action Tank and AIDS Foundation of Chicago, which spearhead legislative advocacy for LGBTQ+ communities.
Beach said they do not know what tomorrow will bring, especially amid the federal funding freeze to NU. However, they said ADVOCATE’s work is necessary because as LGBTQ+ people continue to exist no matter what the current political state is.
“We’re gonna keep the lights on and keep doing good work,” Jordan said.
Email: marleysmith2027@u.northwestern.edu
X: @MarleySSmith
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