At Violet, we view cultural competence as a learnable skill—one that helps providers deliver a higher quality of care. That’s captured in a Violet Benchmark.

In the past, a provider’s level of cultural competence was recorded by self-attestation, using lived experience as a proxy for inclusive care skills. For instance, a hospital may ask whether their providers are allies to or part of the LGBTQIA+ communities. Then the hospital would indicate the provider’s status on public directories. However, this results in a number of issues, like burning out diverse providers and pushing providers to self-identity when they don’t feel safe doing so. Overall, the system lacks an objective measure of the actual quality of care. 

Creating Violet Benchmarks.

In order to make inclusive care more widely available to patients, we created a standardized measure of provider cultural competence. Using decades of clinical research, we developed the first measure of provider cultural competence for BIPOC, LGBQ, and TGNC communities. 

Now, a provider can proudly showcase their skills in working with various communities, rather than needing to self-attest to their own personal identities. 

Patients can also trust a third-party designation of inclusivity that jumps across all touchpoints of their health care journey, from their health plan in-network providers, to a third-party platform to find care, through to their local hospital system directories. 

How Benchmarks help our customers.

Violet Benchmarks work by collecting information about a provider’s training and education, professional experience, communities of interest, and confidence levels in addition to lived experience.

In order to validate the efficacy of our Benchmarks, we conduct research studies with our customers. We partnered with Octave, a digital mental health care organization, for a case study that tracked the outcomes of using Violet Benchmarks. As Octave is deeply committed to providing inclusive care, they already had higher than average patient matching rates when we began working with them. As a result of the partnership, Octave was able to push their success rate even higher.

Octave case study results at-a-glance

• Having any Violet Benchmark was associated with higher therapeutic alliance scores and a greater change in PHQ-9 scores.
• 145% more Octave clinicians unlocked for inclusive care routing with Violet Benchmarks.
• Violent Benchmarks increased Octave’s ability to match clients, facilitated faster matches, and more first-match success.
• By care routing with Violet Benchmarks, patient retention rates increased 14% one month after their first session.

Read the full results of our case study with Octave here. 

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Stand out for your commitment to inclusive care. 

Leading care delivery organizations partner with Violet to ensure their patients’ cultural identities are considered during all aspects of care. To learn more about what we do and how we can work together, book a demo today.