Reference no: EM132412696
Assignment - Improving Data Collection across the Health Care System
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.
To identify the next steps toward improving data collection, it is helpful to understand these opportunities and challenges in the context of current practices. In some instances, the opportunities and challenges are unique to each type of organization; in others, they are common to all organizations and include:
How to ask patients and enrollees questions about race, ethnicity, and language and communication needs.
How to train staff to elicit this information in a respectful and efficient manner.
How to address the discomfort of registration/admission staff (hospitals and clinics) or call center staff (health plans) about requesting this information.
How to address potential patient or enrollee pushback respectfully.
How to address system-level issues, such as changes in patient registration screens and data flow.
Previous chapters have provided a framework for eliciting, categorizing, and coding data on race, ethnicity, and language need. This chapter considers strategies that can be applied by various entities to improve the collection of these data and facilitate subsequent reporting of stratified quality measures. It begins by examining current practices and issues related to collecting and sharing data across the health care system. Next is a discussion of steps that can be taken to address these issues and improve data collection processes. This is followed by a review of methods that can be used to derive race and ethnicity data through indirect estimation when obtaining data directly from many patients or enrollees is not possible.
Attachment:- Assignment Files.rar