Making lemonade out of lemons: an approach to combining variable race and ethnicity data from hospitals for quality and safety efforts

Equity is one of the six core healthcare quality domains in ‘Crossing the Quality Chasm’, published by the Institute of Medicine in 2001.1 While substantial quality measurement and improvement work has focused on improving safety, patient-centredness, timeliness, efficiency and efficacy (the other five domains), far less has focused on health equity measurement and improvement. This is in part due to limited adoption of standardised definitions of racial and ethnicities and therefore limited availability of high-quality data on race and ethnicity.2 Having accurate data is a key first step in addressing health inequities, since what is measured influences what is done.3 There are substantial efforts to improve these data availability and quality by healthcare systems, nationally and internationally.2 Currently, adequate efforts require several steps: the decision to collect data, ensuring the quality of data being collected, and reconciliation of race and ethnicity...
Source: Quality and Safety in Health Care - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Editorials Source Type: research