Management

Collecting Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Data in Electronic Health Records

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In 2011, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released the report The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People: Building a Foundation for Better Understanding, the first comprehensive compilation of what is known about the health of each of these groups at different stages of life. This report also outlined an agenda for the research and data collection necessary to form a fuller understanding of this subject. One of the recommendations in this report was that, provided that privacy concerns could be adequately addressed, information on patients’ sexual orientation and gender identity2 should be collected in electronic health records, just as information on race and ethnicity is routinely collected. Such data are essential because demographics provide the foundation for understanding any population’s status and needs. This recommendation recognized that the possible discomfort on the part of health care workers asking questions about sexual orientation and gen- der identity, a lack of knowledge by providers about how to elicit this
1 The planning committee’s role was limited to planning the workshop, and the workshop summary has been prepared by the workshop rapporteurs as a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop. Statements, recommendations, and opinions expressed are those of individual presenters and participants, and are not necessarily endorsed or verified by the Institute of Medicine, and they should not be construed as reflecting any group consensus. 2 In the 2011 Institute of Medicine report, sexual orientation was “conceptualized in terms of sexual attraction, behavior, identity, or some combination of these dimensions” (p. 12). Gender identity was defined using the Bockting (1999) definition as “one’s basic sense of being a man, woman, or other gender (such as transgender)” (IOM, 2011, p. 318).

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Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

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Publisher

: ., 2012

Collation

1-89

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

978-0-309-26804-2

Classification

NONE

Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

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Subject(s)

Collecting Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

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