News: Health Care

National Efforts to Decrease Racial/Ethnic Inequities in Health Care

February 16, 2005

On December 14, 2004 Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) announced a new public-private partnership, entitled the National Health Plan Learning Collaborative to Reduce Disparities and Improve Quality. This Collaborative brings together nine of the Nation's largest health insurance plans, which is the first national effort of its kind to go beyond research and actively tackle racial and ethnic inequities in health care service delivery.

"All of us in the collaborative are committed to addressing the issue of disparities in health care," said AHRQ Director Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D. "This is a wonderful example of the kind of public-private partnership needed to widely address the substantial challenge of reducing complications from diabetes in this country."

According the AHRQ's National Healthcare Disparities Report African Americans, Hispanics, and people who live in poor neighborhoods are hospitalized more often from complications from diabetes in this country. In order to guide quality improvement, a key collaborative goal is to address and reduce barriers to data collection in order to facilitate the identification of disparities. Over the next three years, the collaborative will test ways to improve the collection and analysis of data on race and ethnicity.

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Source: "Major Health Plans and Organizations Join AHRQ To Reduce Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care", December 14, 2004, Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality