Healthcare Management

Race, Ethnicity, and Language Data

---

The goal of eliminating disparities in health care in the United States remains elusive. The findings of the National Healthcare Disparities Report reveal that even as quality improves on specific measures, disparities often persist (AHRQ, 2008a, 2008b). Addressing these disparities must begin with the fundamental step of bringing the nature of the disparities and the groups at risk for those disparities to light by collecting health care quality information stratified by race, ethnicity and language data. Then attention can be focused on where interventions might be best applied, and on planning and evaluating those efforts to inform the development of policy and the application of resources. A lack of standardization of categories for race, ethnicity, and language data has been suggested as one obstacle to achieving more widespread collection and utilization of these data. Many types of entities participate in initiatives to improve the quality of health care; health plans, hospitals, other providers, and health systems can and should obtain race, ethnicity, and language data so these data can be used to identify gaps and improve care for all individuals. The purpose of this report is to identify standardized categories for the variables of race, ethnicity, and language that can be used to facilitate the sharing, compilation, and comparison of quality data stratified by the standard categories. The Institute of Medicine, under a contract with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), formed the Subcommittee on Standardized Collection of Race/Ethnicity Data for Healthcare Quality Improvement to identify current models for collecting and coding race, ethnicity, and language data; to ascertain the challenges involved in obtaining these data in health care settings; and to make recommendations for improvement. The language in the statement of task (Box S-1)—“in healthcare quality improvement” and “assess and report on quality of care”—led the subcommittee to focus its discussion and recommendations on data collection in the domain of health care services.

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

-

Call Number

-

Publisher

: ., 2009

Collation

1-287

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

978-0-309-14012-6

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

-

Subject(s)

Race, Ethnicity, and Language Data

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment