Geoffrey Roche realized his life's calling while speaking to the homeless in the Pocono Mountains.
Roche, then a hospital administrator for the Pocono Medical Center, was tasked with finding inequities with health care provided to less fortunate in northeast Pennsylvania.
"I learned through that process by bringing healthcare to them, in the woods talking with them at their tent," Roche said. "I learned so much about how we can lift people up by having conversations with them, where we are culturally aware of their healthcare issues, and that was in many ways what inspired me around this work."
Years later, Roche, now the executive director of healthcare strategies at Harrisburg University, was recently named to the National Health Equity Task Force, established by the CDC Foundation through the Morehouse College of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.
Roche is one of 115 health care experts nationwide invited to participate in the task force, which will study how marginalized communities are not treated equally in the health care system. It's an issue more prevalent now than ever, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"COVID-19 in many ways has raised the alarms and said 'Here we go again. We have significant inequities across our country,'" Roche said. "And it’s not just health inequities in our healthcare systems. These are structural issues in our communities and societies."
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black and Hispanic populations are anywhere from four-to-five times more likely to contract COVID-19 than white people. Roche believes the issue of unequal health care is not something which can be studied as urban versus rural, but through each neighborhood and community.
The National Health Equity Task Force is focused on COVID-19 right now, as they started meeting for the first time on Monday, July 13. However, the federal government awarded Morehouse College $40 million to discuss the issue of health care inequities over the next three years.
"I describe it as a life‘s mission," Roche said. "We've got to get our hands around every aspect of these issues. We've got to collaborate with government. Collaborate with industry, across the whole spectrum, the ecosystem of healthcare. This is going to be an opportunity to do that."
Roche lives with his family in Annville. He is an adjunct professor in health care management at Lebanon Valley College.