Standardization of Patient Race, Ethnicity and Language Data (posted 9/9)

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has released a report suggesting that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) develop national standards for collecting data on patient race, ethnicity and primary language to better understand and address care quality disparities.  The Institute of Medicine (IOM) formed the Subcommittee on Standardized Col­lection of Race/Ethnicity Data for Healthcare Quality Improvement to examine ap­proaches to standardization because a lack of standard­ization of race, ethnicity, and language categories acts as an obstacle to achieving more widespread collection and utilization of these data to eliminate disparities.  In its 2009 report, Race, Ethnicity, and Language Data: Standardization for Health Care Quality Improvement, the subcommittee recommends collection of more granular ethnicity and language need according to national standards in addition to OMB race and Hispanic ethnicity categories.  The report states that the presence of data on race, ethnicity, and lan­guage does not, in and of itself, guarantee subsequent actions in terms of analysis of quality-of-care data to identify health care needs or actions to reduce or eliminate disparities that are found.  The absence of data, however, essentially guarantees that none of those actions will occur.  To download the report from the IOM website click here.

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