Headline

This toolkit details how hospitals and health systems can use patient race, ethnicity, and language data to advance health equity and eliminate disparities.

Context

Health care organizations are at various stages in their efforts to advance health equity. Many are looking for evidence-based strategies to inform their organizational planning and implementation. This toolkit on data collection and stratification is one in a series from the American Hospital Association’s Institute for Diversity and Health Equity. It focuses on how hospitals and health systems can address disparate health outcomes through collecting, validating, stratifying, and applying patient race, ethnicity, and language data.

About this Tool

This toolkit contains a variety of resources on how to collect and use data to address gaps in access or quality of care and ultimately eliminate disparities. Some suggestions for what health systems can do include:

• Collecting race, ethnicity, and language data to understand patient needs, identify disparities, and address gaps in care
• Using a framework to systematically collect demographic data, and validate this data for accuracy, timeliness, and consistency;
• Identifying metrics and stratifying health disparities data; and
• Involving hospital and health system board members in reviewing data to inform organizational strategies for eliminating disparities.

Resources in this toolkit include assessment tools for program evaluation and a discussion guide for senior leadership and care teams to examine current practices and develop shared priorities in collecting race, ethnicity, and language data to promote more equitable care.

Takeaways

Hospitals and health systems can use this toolkit to guide organizational health equity efforts on collecting, validating, stratifying, and applying patient race, ethnicity, and language data to address health disparities.