Question

In a minimum of 250 words, discuss your experience you might had or a situation that you are familiar with in the healthcare field where healthcare data would have been useful. Please include 2 references.

Answer 1

Addressing health and health care disparities requires the full involvement of organizations that have an existing infrastructure for quality measurement and improvement. Although hospitals, community health centers (CHCs), physician practices, health plans, and local, state, and federal agencies can all play key roles by incorporating race, ethnicity, and language data into existing data collection and quality reporting efforts, each faces opportunities and challenges in attempting to achieve this objective.

Collecting and Sharing Data Across The Health Care System

Health care involves a diverse set of public and private data collection systems, including health surveys, administrative enrollment and billing records, and medical records, used by various entities, including hospitals, CHCs, physicians, and health plans. Data on race, ethnicity, and language are collected, to some extent, by all these entities, suggesting the potential of each to contribute information on patients or enrollees. The flow of data illustrated in des not even fully reflect the complexity of the relationships involved or the disparate data requests within the health care system. Currently, fragmentation of data flow occurs because of silos of data collection (NRC, 2009).

Hospitals

Because hospitals tend to have information systems for data collection and reporting, staff who are used to collecting registration and admissions data, and an organizational culture that is familiar with the tools of quality improvement, they are relatively well positioned to collect patients' demographic data. In addition, hospitals have a history of collecting race data. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 19643 and Medicare legislation in 1965,4 there was a legislative mandate for equal access to and desegregation of hospitals (Reynolds, 1997). Therefore it is not surprising that more than 89 percent of hospitals report collecting race and ethnicity data, and 79 percent report collecting data on primary language (AHA, 2008).