On April 5, New Albany resident Dr. Nwando Olayiwola stepped into the roles of senior vice president and chief health equity officer for Humana. And while this is a new position for her, the work is not.
“This is the first time I’ll have an official title that says health equity in it,” Olayiwola says, “but I would say everything that I have been committed to professionally and personally, for as long as I can remember, has been about equity, health equity, inclusion and social justice.”
Until her recent appointment to Humana, Olayiwola served as both professor and chair of the department of family and community medicine at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
Among numerous other roles, she’s also an author, activist and speaker. She serves on the New Albany Inclusion, Diversity and Equity Action Committee, which is now developing recommendations for the city on how to create an environment that is welcoming to all people, a diverse citizenship, and inspire participation in community activities and leadership roles.
You can find her recent TEDx presentation, Combatting Racism and Place-ism in Medicine, on the TEDx Talks YouTube page, or watch it below.
“We took an oath,” she says on the TEDx Talk. “We promised our patients and our society that we would take care of them, that we would do no harm. Honor your oath and give patients the love and the care that they need, and together we can give life, love, hope and healing to the communities we serve, and together we can do no harm.”
The TEDx Talk was received well, not only by her colleagues at OSU but by the central Ohio community. She says teachers at New Albany High School have reached out, among others, to tell her how they’ll be using her video in their classes. Her son, Darius, is even using her TEDx Talk for a research paper.
Raymond G. LaVoie
“I got outreach from an engineer at Ohio State who has an engineering course on anti-racism technology,” Olayiwola adds. “He saw my TEDx Talk and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I have to reach out to her.’ And now he’s going to be using my TEDx Talk as part of his course to set the stage for how engineering can really be applied to fight racial injustice.”
Olayiwola has been working with engineers to develop technology she describes in her TEDx Talk which helps doctors attend to aspects of care for patients which they might otherwise overlook due to unconscious biases.
“One of the challenges that we’re realizing is that some of some of this work is so heavily nuanced,” she says. “Some of the racist behaviors that we have in medicine are not even in our consciousness. So, you don’t even realize you’re perpetuating racism by not asking a Black woman about her pain, you just don’t do it because you don’t do it or were not trained to do it. In many cases, you may not even realize the unconscious bias, which is why I said that technology could help, because it could bring that bias from your subconscious into your consciousness.”
In her new role, Olayiwola’s work will focus on Humana’s patients and clients and help give them the tools they need to be successful advocates for their own health.
“One of the things that I have been talking about with the people that I’m going to be working with at Humana is about the tools we have at our disposal to be able to empower our patients and members to live healthy lives, to make healthy decisions and to have access to the best health and health care,” she says. “How can we better tackle the social determinants of health that threaten wellness and opportunity? Can we equip patients and their communities with the right language, provide the right consumer-centered education and resources and create the right tools for health literacy that will allow them to be really effective and empowered consumers?”
As the inaugural person to hold the new role at Humana, she says the health insurance company realized the damaging aspects of health disparities across the nation and felt it needed to have a role singularly focused on looking at everything through a health equity lens. Thus, the chief health equity officer position was born.
Olayiwola with Paul, and their children Nissi and Darius.
A Passion Fulfilled
Olayiwola has always known she would work in the field of health care, standing up for the underdogs.
In Nigeria, where Olayiwola spent time as a child until she moved back to the U.S. with her parents and her older brother in the ’70s, her aunt worked as a general practitioner for their community, which was Olayiwola’s first exposure to the health care industry.
“I have absolutely wanted to be a doctor and healer for a long time,” she says. “My earliest interest in being a doctor was because I saw that there was something special about every time my aunt in Nigeria visited ill people as a general practitioner. They were so excited and welcomed her plus whomever was with her with so much hospitality. Of course, my younger attraction to being a doctor evolved from getting treats and juice from ill neighbors to much more substance.”
Throughout middle and high school, her passion only grew.
“Once it was clear that that’s what I wanted to do, (my parents) were like, ‘OK, we’ll help figure out what you need to be prepared and competitive,’” she says. “By the time I finished high school, I was 100 percent sure that this is what I wanted to do with my life.”
In 1994, while she was in high school, Olayiwola attended a research camp at OSU, and recently reread the paper she wrote on her findings.
“It was researching health disparities in a certain childhood cancer for people in urban areas versus mixed communities and rural communities,” she says. “I sent a picture to my parents, and they said, ‘You’ve been doing this health equity work forever!’”
Olayiwola’s family has been a major support system for her throughout her education and career. Her parents, both Ph.D.s, were incredible role models for her growing up, and her husband and kids keep up that steadfast support.
“My husband has been such a great source of support, and my hype man for so much of my career,” she says. “He’s always there. It’s really been amazing. All the moves that we’ve made related to my career have been because of his support and his inspiration. Sometimes he sees more in me than I do.”
Alongside her work with health equity, Olayiwola’s passion for supporting women has been burning strong since her childhood days. In the eighth grade, she ran for student council president.
“I had this whole platform of issues that I was going to focus on because I wondered things like, ‘Why is it much harder for the girls to get to the advanced classes, especially in the math and science courses?’ ‘How can we get better resources for the girls’ athletics teams?’ I had this whole agenda, this whole plan,” she says. “My opponent, God bless him, was campaigning around things like, ‘We need some gummy bears in the vending machines.’ And I thought, ‘Wait, what? I’m talking about real things!’”
One of Olayiwola’s close friends told her that she probably wouldn’t win due to her race and her gender. Although Olayiwola did lose, a life lesson stuck with her.
“Even if I don’t win on the actual votes, I never want to lose on the values,” she says. “I’m still proud of what I ran on and the kinds of issues that I cared about and the fact that I still, despite all those things that my friend said would make it unlikely that I would win, that I still went for it and campaigned hard for it.”’
Coming Together
Olayiwola presented during a February 2021 Lunch and Learn at Healthy New Albany. She is pictured with her husband, Paul, and Sheryl and Phil Heit.
The Olayiwolas came to New Albany not too long before the start of the pandemic. She says they were welcomed with open arms, and even went to dinner with Phil Heit and his wife, Sheryl.
“It was really great to see the evolution of the city through their eyes, their work and their leadership in the community,” she says.
However, one of the most beautiful moments grew out of a deeply unsettling one. Olayiwola’s son and some friends were playing basketball at the New Albany Links when a white man – without provocation – began to demand to know what the boys were doing. He assumed they did not belong.
“(The kids) were trying to prove that they belonged, that their parents paid dues to the club and they were all members of the club,” she says. “All of the kids were discouraged and left to go home.”
Immediately, Olayiwola says she reached out to SOAR-AAPN (Setting Objectives Achieving Results – African-American Parents Network), the network of African-American families in New Albany who had embraced them right when they moved to the area. Responses began flooding in, and community members’ support grew exponentially.
“Before I knew it, yesterday evening, I was talking with the mayor of New Albany and he was sharing with me his deep, deep disappointment in what had happened and sincere apologies for what happened to our son and his friends,” she says.
The response Olayiwola and her family received from the community following the incident is the reason she loves New Albany, she says.
“Nothing’s going to be perfect. In fact, there’s nowhere we are going to go that’s going to be a perfect haven of diversity, inclusivity, openness and tolerance,” she says. “However, what matters is what happens when things do go wrong. And what happened said everything to me. The mobilization of the African-American parents in the area, the concern of the city council and the direct involvement of the mayor himself. These are the kind of things that will make me continue to be committed to staying in and improving a city like this.”
Sarah Robinson is an associate editor. Feedback welcome at srobinson@cityscenemediagroup.com.
