Health Care Organizations' Use of Data on Race/Ethnicity to Address Disparities in Health Care

Abstract

Publication of the Institute of Medicine report Unequal Treatment (Smedley, Stith, and Nelson 2003) represented a key transition point in the field of disparities research.Up to that point, the vast majority of studies had been descriptive in nature, documenting racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in specific domains of clinical care.Researchers, funding agencies, and health care policy-makers agree, however, that studies of racial/ethnic disparities should move beyond documenting disparities to focus on either understanding the causes of disparities or the development and testing of interventions designed to reduce or eliminate disparities.Such a movement is already occurring, as several recent papers provide sophisticated analyses of either underlying mechanisms or approaches to eliminating disparities (Earle et al. 2002;Tammemagi et al. 2004) Understanding these underlying mechanisms, though, is only a step toward actually reducing or eliminating disparities.Given the range of potential causes of disparities, elimination of disparities will require action at several levels: federal policy; state and local policy; public and private purchasers of health care; health plans; large organizational providers like hospitals and medical groups; individual providers; patients and family members; and community groups.The potential actions of federal, state, and local policy-makers have been described elsewhere (Lurie, Jung, and Lavizzo-Mourey 2005).Governmental action by itself is unlikely to eliminate disparities in health care, however, as many of the proximal causes of disparities are based in policies and behaviors of the health care delivery system that are beyond the reach of government.Reduction of racial and ethnic disparities in the quality of health care will r

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.