OVERVIEW: Health care equity is key to health care quality. It is well documented that racial and ethnic minorities suffer disproportionately from increased rates of disease and poor health status in the United States. They are also subject to disparities in the quality of treatment they receive, even when insurance coverage and socioeconomic status are similiar. 

Health care policymakers have invested in national efforts to identify and document health care disparities, but there have been few local initiatives to document disparities at a local or regional level. Some of the challenges in collecting and analyzing data on health care disparities at a local level include limited funding, provider resistance, and recognition that to achieve meaningful results, quality data must be aggregated across providers in a region.

A new issue brief documents a process for aggregating regional hospital performance data, stratified by race and ethnicity, to create a local-level model for measuring and monitoring health care disparities. The brief also documents challenges to identifying disparities, and describes strategies for overcoming these challenges.

Read the issue brief