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The Disparities Solutions Center has released several publications that highlight practical solutions to identify and address disparities within hospitals and other health care oganizations. We also feature other resources related to health care disparities elimination.
Improving Quality and Achieving Equity: A Guide for Hospital Leaders
Assuring HealthCare Quality: A Healthcare Equity Blueprint
Creating Equity Reports: A Guide for Hospitals
HHS Advisory Committee on Minority Health: A Statement of Principles and Recommendations
Center for Prevention and Health Services Issue Brief
Center for Health Professions - ACTION Initiative
Kaiser Permanente - A Provider's Handbook on Culturally Competent Care
American Hospital Association - Eliminating Disparities: Why it's Essential and How to Get it Done
The Disparities Solutions Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is proud to annouce the release of Improving Quality and Achieving Equity: A Guide for Hospital Leaders.
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) Report Crossing the Quality Chasm, released in 2001, highlights that there is a significant gap between the quality of health care people should receive, and the quality of health care people do receive. Just a year later, the IOM released another influential report, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, highlighting an even larger quality chasm for racial/ethnic minorities in the United States.
Over the last few years, there has been an increased focus by hospital leadership on improving quality by responding to the six key elements proposed in Crossing the Quality Chasm. In regards to equity, research has shown that racial and ethnic disparities in health care have an impact on quality, safety, cost, and risk management. Addressing disparities has now been acknowledged by the National Quality Forum and the Joint Commission as essential component of quality. Despite this, few hospital leaders have the issue of equity, and identifying and addressing disparities, prominently on their radar screen.
The goals of this Guide are to:
- Highlight the evidence for racial and ethnic disparities in health care and provide the rationale for addressing them—with a focus on quality, cost, risk management and accreditation.
- Highlight model practices—hospitals and leaders who are actively engaged in addressing disparities and achieving equity.
- Recommend a set of activities and resources that can help hospital leaders initiate an agenda for action in this area.
View Web-Based Report
Download the Complete Guide
Download Executive Summary
The Healthcare Equity Blueprint offers strategies and practices that can be tailored to individual hospitals to address equity in providing quality care. The Blueprint is a starting point for designing and implementing interventions to address racial and ethnic disparities in health care. Aspects of this Blueprint apply to numerous health care settings, but the primary focus is on hospitals. In addition, the Blueprint should be considered "a work in progress," to be improved and modified by hospitals that use it.
The proposed improvement strategies are grouped into the following five categories:
- Create Partnerships with the Community, Patients, and Families
- Exercise Governance and Executive Leadership for Providing Quality and Equitable Care
- Provide Evidence-Based Care to All Patients in a Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Manner
- Establish Measures for Equitable Care
- Communicate in the Patient’s Language — Understand and be Responsive to Cultural Needs and Expectations
The Blueprint also provides recommended tools, resources, and guidelines on the collection and measurement of data related to addressing health care disparities.
Executives and governing bodies may use this Blueprint to organize and prioritize the goals, strategies, expected outcomes, and performance benchmarks for addressing health care equity within their established strategic planning process. Working groups within the hospital may identify specific changes in care and support operations that can be tested initially on a small scale within an organizational unit.
Download the Complete Report.
Just as a quality report allows hospital executives, physicians, and staff to examine quality of care across multiple dimensions, an equity report highlights potential inequalities in utilization, care processes, outcomes, and patient experiences with care. By building on existing quality reporting efforts, an equity report helps examine the extent to which a hospital provides equally high quality care to all patients, regardless of their race, ethnicity, language, socioeconomic status, and other characteristics.
Creating Equity Reports: A Guide for Hospitals is a resource that can help your staff develop an equity report. The Guide provides practical information on how to collect data on race, ethnicity, language, and socioeconomic status – and how to use those data to develop an equity report that will allow your hospital to take action.
Download the Complete Guide
Download an Executive Summary for Hospital Leaders
View an archive of the web seminar featuring this tool
*Funded by the generous support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, with additional support from the Office of the Attorney General of Massachusetts
The HHS Advisory Committee on Minority Health recently released a statement of principles and recommendations -
Released February 2009 from the National Business Group on Health
The U.S. Census Bureau projects that race-based minorities, including Hispanics, African Americans and Asians, which currently represent one-third of the U.S. population, will become a majority in 2042. Employers need to be aware of these demographic shifts and to understand that in this new environment, a “one-size-fits-all” approach to employee health benefits will not be effective.
This Issue Brief will:
1. Explore key causes of health disparities in the U.S. and its workforce;
2. Make a case for why it is more important than ever for employers to address disparities
in health and health care; and
3.
Present steps employers can take to address health disparities.
Center for Health Professions - ACTION Initiative
The ACTION program is accepting applications from organizations in California for technical assistance and seed funding from organizations looking to address equity of care using quality improvement approaches.
Technical assistance will be provided based on applicants’ needs and is likely to include the following areas: quality improvement methods, patient-provider communications, disease management, survey instruments, and quality dashboards.
To apply and for more information, please visit the ACTION website or download a factsheet.
Kaiser Permanente - A Provider's Handbook on Culturally Competent Care
See recent release, Women's Health Edition. Kaiser Permanente is committed to providing linguistically and culturally competent care to its increasingly diverse membership. Meeting the needs of its membership and addressing the urgent national problem of disparities in health status and health care delivery require interventions that are respectful, patientcentered, and culturally skilled. One such intervention is the Provider Handbooks. The goal of the Provider Handbooks is to provide Kaiser Permanente clinicians with an overview of the cultural and epidemiological differences that characterize major cultural groups represented within our membership. The Handbooks focus on common characteristics of each group that may have implications for health care organizations and practitioners.
For more information, please see the recent Handbook women's health.
American Hospital Assocation
American Hospital Association highlights the Disparities Solutions Centers' efforts to reduce racial/ethnic disparities in Eliminating Disparities: Why it's Essential and How to Get it Done.
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