Creation of the American Heart Association Journals’ Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Editorial Board: The Next Step to Achieving the 2024 Impact Goal

Nowhere in here do they mention including patients in their boards. Patients obviously mean nothing to them.

Creation of the American Heart Association Journals’ Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Editorial Board: The Next Step to Achieving the 2024 Impact Goal

Eldrin F. Lewis,

Christine Beaty,

Johannes Boltze,

Khadijah Breathett,

Walter K. Clair,

Lisa de las Fuentes,

Utibe R. Essien,

Heather Goodell,

H.E. Hinson,

Kiarri N. Kershaw,

… See all authors

Originally published18 Jul 2022https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.061450Circulation. 2022;146:721–723

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Approximately 2 years ago, the American Heart Association’s (AHA) National Board commissioned volunteer leaders to develop new goals to address health equity and to provide strong science to reduce health care disparities, including consideration of social determinants of health, structural racism, and rural health inequities. This effort resulted in the 2024 Impact Goal,¹ which states that “every person deserves the opportunity for a full, healthy life. As champions for health equity, by 2024, the AHA will advance cardiovascular health for all, including identifying and removing barriers to health care access and quality.” One of the 10 commitments stated in the 2024 Impact Goal is to enhance the focus of our AHA scientific journals (https://www.ahajournals.org) on disparities, health equity, antiracism, community-engaged/community-based participatory research, and implementation science.

To achieve this goal, the Scientific Publishing Committee has worked closely with the Editors-in-Chief of the 13 AHA original research journals on several initiatives. First, through the optional self-reported demographic data that users have provided in our manuscript tracking system, we collected and measured the composition of editorial boards, invited authors, and invited reviewers for gender, racial, and ethnic diversity. We made this information publicly available in aggregate (along with additional information on demographic terms and categories) and intend to provide annual updates at https://www.ahajournals.org/journal-demographics. Although we have achieved some successes, such as a slight increase in the percentage of participating individuals who report as female or as part of an underrepresented racial and ethnic group, there is room for progress, which is a major goal for 2024. Going forward, we will review how this information is collected along with the types of demographic categories and editorial roles captured. By collecting and reviewing these data regularly, we can better identify weaknesses and systematically work to improve diversity.

Next, we created an online collection of all articles related to the 2024 Impact Goal, termed the “Health Equity Collection” (https://www.ahajournals.org/health-equity), which includes key AHA Scientific Statements, original research, reviews, editorials, and other articles published since 2015 on topics related to health equity. There are themed issues, including an annual health equity/disparities issue in Circulation and Focused Update in Stroke, Go Red issues on women and heart disease across the portfolio, a special issue on implementation science in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes planned for late 2022, and publications on the inaugural development of disparities research guidelines² and the goal of addressing structural racism as a major contributor to cardiovascular inequity.³Stroke is piloting an initiative to query authors about the diversity of research participants and steering committee composition for clinical trials. We also established an author name change policy that allows authors to change their name more easily throughout publications in AHA journals for reasons including, but not limited to, gender identity, marriage, divorce, and religious conversion (https://www.ahajournals.org/name-change).

To help support and coordinate these growing efforts, the next logical step was the investment of the time, effort, and funds to create the AHA Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Editorial Board (https://www.ahajournals.org/edi-editorial-board). The role of the EDI Editorial Board is to facilitate more and better science in the health equity and diversity space and increase representation throughout the editorial, author, and reviewer pool. With input from the Editors-in-Chief, the EDI Editorial Board was formed and has met regularly over the past year to develop a workflow, standardize nomenclature for published manuscripts, and minimize the effect on length of review (Figure). During submission, authors will be asked if their manuscript focuses on demographic differences or other issues related to EDI (for examples see Breathett et al² and Boyd et al⁴) and will complete a brief checklist. Most manuscripts will undergo initial review without any change in the submission process. For manuscripts invited for revisions, editors can optionally request an additional review by a member of the EDI Editorial Board who would view the work through an “EDI lens.”

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Figure. Proposed workflow of manuscripts using the EDI Editorial Board. EDI indicates Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.