Data Collection and Reporting for Healthcare Disparities

CHICAGO, April 9, 2009—Data for race, ethnicity, language, cultural, and socioeconomic status is often inaccurate, incomplete or never collected by healthcare providers, which creates healthcare disparities amongst diverse patient groups, according to an article in the April issue of the Journal of AHIMA.  

This article explains how the benefits of complete and accurate data capture have a far-reaching impact that includes improving the quality of healthcare by addressing all of the disparities in care. Also provided is information about the 2002 landmark study Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care in which the Institute of Medicine documented evidence that race and ethnicity are significant predictors of the quality of care. However, the Uniform Hospital Discharge Data Set includes only five categories: White, Black, Unknown, Asian and Other, which could lead to overuse of a category. While five subsets are too few categories to capture the diversity of all patients, using too many classifications makes data collection cumbersome.

Data Collection and Reporting for Healthcare Disparities includes a sidebar that provides information about the Health Research and Educational Trust toolkit, which is a resource for organizations seeking to standardize and improve their data collection processes. Additionally, a second sidebar lists a breakdown of equity data that health information management departments can use to conduct a performance improvement assessment to ensure accuracy and quality of data capture.

Read the complete article in the April issue of the Journal of AHIMA or online at journal.ahima.org.

About AHIMA

The American Health Information Management Association is America’s leading professional society whose mission is to “improve healthcare by advancing best practices and standards for health information management and [serve as] the trusted source for education, research and professional credentialing.” AHIMA represents more than 53,000 specially educated HIM professionals who serve healthcare and the public by managing, analyzing and utilizing data vital for health system management. www.ahima.org