On April 15, 2009 the Massachusetts Health Care Quality and Cost Council (HCQCC) unanimously approved recommendations from an expert panel organized by the Quality Alliance Steering Committee’s High-Value Health Care Project. These recommendations offer best practices in collecting and reporting race, ethnicity, and language data and will become part of the state-wide mandate that all health plans collect and report this data effective July 2009.

The recommendations focus on four main areas designed to help reduce large racial and ethnic disparities in care:

• Utilizing self-reported data for race and ethnicity
• Collecting patient-preferred spoken language as well as written language 
• Setting an aggressive collection and reporting threshold that increases over time 
• Encouraging the interim use of indirect estimation

In order to reach these recommendations, the High-Value Health Care Project staff at the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform at Brookings conducted a comprehensive assessment of Massachusetts health plans and convened the Massachusetts Expert Panel on the Standardization of Race/Ethnicity and Language Data Reporting by Health Plans.

The Engelberg Center works to help reduce large racial and ethnic disparities in care. Through its support of state and regional pilot programs the Center is identifying consensus-based strategies to create standard categories for race/ethnicity and language reporting; ensure accurate collection of patient and enrollee data across health care sectors; and promote appropriate use and dissemination of information on health system performance among various racial/ethnic groups.