Racial/Ethnic Health Care Equity Initiative
Equity is a key issue in achieving high-quality health care for all Americans. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) urges that all groups are provided with health services and information resources that are tailored to consumers from various racial/ethnic and socio-demographic backgrounds. In particular, the IOM suggests that health care organizations should collect, report, and monitor critical patient-care data to build a foundation for solutions to racial/ethnic disparities in care. Despite continued attention to data concerns, inadequate information continues to limit the analyses of health care-related disparities and their outcomes.

Promoting Equity in Health Care
The Engelberg Center is promoting equity in health care through a variety of initiatives with input from key stakeholder groups including consumers, providers, payers, and representatives of state and federal governments. Specifically, the Center is developing consensus-based strategies for: 

• Creating standard categories for race/ethnicity and language reporting; 
• Ensuring accurate collection of patient and enrollee data across health care sectors; and 
• Promoting appropriate use and dissemination of information on health system performance among various racial/ethnic groups.

Through pilot demonstrations and scholarly reports, the Center is currently providing technical assistance to states and regions to advance these goals, including:
 
Developing and testing state-of-the art methods for direct data collection on race/ethnicity identifiers. The Engelberg Center is working with regional and state partners to provide technical assistance to hospitals and health plans to provide recommendations for: 1) standard categories for data collection, 2) thresholds for reporting data, and 3) achieving administrative simplification.

Identifying and testing state-of-the-art approaches to estimating disparities for application with administrative data sets. While direct, self-reported data collection is considered the ‘gold-standard’ many health care organizations are a long way from realizing this standard. As an interim solution, the Center is partnering with the RAND Corporation to validate and pilot test indirect estimation algorithms for use by states and health plans across the U.S. to analyze and address population level disparities.

Identifying practical steps to assist communities and others to understand and effectively address equity problems in health care performance. Accurate data are obsolete if they are not used to develop interventions to increase equity. Through a national conference in October 2009, the Engelberg Center will share best practices for communities to effectively disseminate and use performance data stratified by race/ethnicity.