Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal recognizes Diane Tran for transforming community health
Since Diane Tran joined Fairview Health Services in 2015, she has helped make the organization a leader in building trusting community and system collaborations to advance health equity in the community and in the healthcare system.
For her strides in making healthcare more equitable, Tran has been named to the 2025 Women in Business list from Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.
Tran is the founding executive director of the M Health Fairview Center for Community Health Equity headquartered at the Fairview Community Health and Wellness Hub in St. Paul. She leads a nine-person team that is responsible for community relations, health equity initiatives, community health needs assessments, community benefit reporting, and corporate social responsibility.
“The daughter of refugees, Diane is acutely aware of the influence of place in shaping an individual’s life and is committed to building the capacity and resilience of her local communities,” said John Swanholm, vice president of Community Advancement at Fairview.
Here are some of Tran's contributions:
East Side Health and Well-Being Collaborative
Emerging research shows that ZIP code is increasingly a greater predictor of health outcomes than genetic code. Under Tran's leadership, Fairview formed and leads the East Side Health and Well-Being Collaborative, which is made up of more than 20 community organizations that came together to make the East Side of St. Paul a more vibrant and healthier place to live and work.
The collaborative co-designed two culturally responsive programs based on identified needs: food access and cultural brokers. These community programs have spread and scaled over the years to involve additional partners, provide infrastructure to support Fairview’s operational work to screen for and respond to the social drivers of health, and further equip the organization in its efforts to provide value-based care. The collaborative celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.
HOPE Commission
In the wake of the tragic murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the COVID-19 pandemic that disproportionately impacted people of color, Diane was selected to create the Healing, Opportunity, People, Equity (HOPE) Commission along with Taj Mustapha, MD, an internist and pediatrician and the M Health Fairview chief equity strategy officer; and Christopher Warlick, MD, a urologist with M Health Fairview and professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
The HOPE Commission conducted an audit of organizational equity initiatives and hosted listening and learning sessions with employees, patients, and community members in English and other top languages for our patient populations. The Commission developed a set of recommendations for the health system to become increasingly anti-racist and inclusive in order to produce more equitable outcomes and experiences, including embedding this work across the organization.
To that end, M Health Fairview partners developed key equity leadership roles and Tran launched the Center for Community Health Equity. As a core part of this work, Tran has spearheaded a cross-departmental effort to engage and leverage the voices and insights of patients, employees, community, and prospective customers to ensure that those most impacted by our system’s healthcare policies and processes can inform and influence these decisions. For example, the Birth Justice Initiative, which Tran leads in partnership with service line leaders, recently changed policies to eliminate race and ethnic bias in pregnancy and delivery care.
Tran also serves on the System Quality Health Equity Committee, the Employee Resource Group Executive Oversight Committee, and the System Patient and Family Advisory Committee.
Center for Community Health Equity
The Center for Community Health Equity is an extension of our health system’s community advancement work. It formalizes efforts to work with the community to reduce racial and other disparities in community health. The center has resources and programs available, which Tran helped build, to address the social determinants of health, factors of daily life that can have a larger effect on health than medical care alone.
- Fair Table, our Food is Medicine initiative, provides food to people experiencing food insecurity.
- Housing is Health offers referrals to safe, reliable housing to the unhoused.
- Connection is Cure is building trust through social connections, centering linguistic and cultural diversity, and bridging silos across our hospital system and communities.
In addition, the center has worked to advocate for a social determinants of health policy agenda in coalition with groups including Partners to End Hunger, Healthcare for Housing, and the Birth Justice Collaborative. Tran represents M Health Fairview in serving on the Minnesota Department of Health’s Health Equity Advisory and Leadership (HEAL) Council and Second Harvest Heartland’s Make Hunger History Advisory Board.
The Center is also developing Population Health Equity Initiatives including the Native Health Equity Initiative, Black Health Equity Initiative, and the Birth Justice Initiative. Through the Native Health Equity Initiative, M Health Fairview has co-hosted an annual “Healing in Four Directions” Pow Wow and partnered with the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council (MIAC) for American Indian Day on the Hill year after year in order to build trust and partnership with Indigenous communities.
Through these systemic efforts to listen, learn, and act, Tran has led meaningful change to impact and advance community health equity.
