Preparing the national healthcare disparities report: gaps in data for assessing racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in health care.
BACKGROUND
Efforts to quantify, monitor, understand, and reduce disparities in health care are critically dependent on the collection of high-quality data that support such analyses. In producing the first National Healthcare Disparities Report (NHDR), a number of gaps in data were encountered that limited the ability to assess racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in health care.


OBJECTIVE
The objectives of this study were to identify and quantify gaps in data related to disparities in health care and discuss efforts to fill these gaps in future NHDRs.


RESULTS
: Data on specific racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups were often not collected or collected in formats that differed from federal standards. When collected, data were often insufficient to generate reliable estimates for specific racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. These effects were magnified when attempting to assess disparities within many of the agency's priority populations such as women, children, the elderly, low-income populations, and rural residents. Future NHDRs begin to fill some of these gaps in data, but some gaps will likely persist and new gaps will likely arise as the availability of data for specific populations vary from year to year.


CONCLUSIONS
Gaps in data limit the ability to address racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in health care. Although many federal efforts are underway to improve data collection, some groups and populations pose unique challenges for data collection that will be difficult to overcome.
Moy
Ernest
E
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, US Department of Health and Human Services, Rockville, MD 20850, USA. emoy@ahrq.gov
Arispe
Irma E
IE
Holmes
Julia S
JS
Andrews
Roxanne M
RM
D000368:Aged; D000847:Annual Reports as Topic; D002648:Child; D003625:Data Collection; D005006:Ethnicity; D005260:Female; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006302:Health Services Research; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D044469:Racial Groups; D012424:Rural Population; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D014481:United States; D016270:United States Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality