As the U.S. population grows more racially and culturally diverse with each passing decade, hospitals and health care workers are faced with unique challenges in providing care to the diverse communities they serve. Government and private-sector entities have sought to better understand disparities in health care outcomes, access, utilization and quality, but those efforts are often hampered by the limited availability and inconsistent quality of data.
The WHA Information Center (WHAIC) has been collecting race and ethnicity data elements from Wisconsin hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers – and recently added both filters to your Kaavio health care data analysis tool.
Your health care organization can use this data to exert a positive influence on cost, quality and access of care, patient safety, and risk management factors. The new filters also allow you to demonstrate improvements on metrics such as patient safety, timeliness of care, effectiveness of care, and patientcenteredness.
In providing care, clinicians must consider factors such as the patient’s age, gender, and comorbidities, as well as their perceptions about illness, any religious or cultural barriers to receiving certain kinds of treatment, language needs, and socio-cultural background. Patient-centered care involves developing treatment plans that are not only clinically effective, but also compatible with the patient’s cultural values, preferences, and needs. This collection of race and ethnicity data enables hospitals to pinpoint the resources needed by clinicians to provide effective, patient-centered care.
WHAIC encourages you to continue to improve the amount and accuracy of these data sets to better measure disparities in care. Valid data collection is essential groundwork for conducting research that helps identify the reasons for race and ethnicity-based health disparities and lead to interventions to ensure that all patients receive quality health care.
For more information, contact WHAIC’s Director of Operations
Brian Competente.
More about Kaavio: WHAIC developed Kaavio as a way for you to access data security from any web browser to analyze and visualize Wisconsin discharge data. Users can analyze Inpatient, Outpatient Surgery, Emergency Room Visits, Observation and Ancillary Services for hospitals and freestanding ambulatory surgery centers and compare them to other facilities based on size or a region.