Collecting Data to Improve Patient Care

By Cynthia Hedges Greising

A tool kit from HRET helps hospitals track patients’ race, ethnicity and primary language.

Cynthia Hedges Greising

Provide high-quality health care to every patient who walks through the door—that is what hospitals and health systems strive to accomplish every day. Yet many hospitals and systems are still struggling to understand their patient populations and ensure they are delivering high-quality care to all. Knowing the race, ethnicity and primary language of patients is important to providing good care.

Gaining such critical knowledge has not always been easy. But a recently released and extensively revised disparities tool kit from the Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET) provides comprehensive information, training materials and resource links that can guide hospitals in collecting and using race, ethnicity and language data better than ever before.

Using a Uniform Framework

As health care organizations work toward better serving diverse populations, leaders must recognize the importance of understanding the unique characteristics of the communities they serve. Efforts to improve health care delivery require working with key staff and giving them the tools to create the best responses to problems and opportunities. The HRET disparities tool kit helps health care organizations assess their capacity to collect information on race, ethnicity and primary language and implement a uniform framework designed specifically for collecting this data from patients—including patients with limited English proficiency and those who are deaf or hard of hearing—or their caregivers.

The uniform framework offered by the tool kit includes:

a rationale for why the patient is being asked to provide information;
a script for staff to use each time when asking for information;
a method for allowing patients to self-identify their responses;
a standardized approach for “rolling up” granular responses for analytical and reporting purposes; and
assurances that the data will be kept confidential and accessed by a limited number of people.

Linking Data to Quality Measures

The ultimate goal for collecting data on race, ethnicity and primary language is to improve the quality of care for all patients. Evidence indicates that quality improvement efforts, when linked to data on race and ethnicity, can improve the quality of care and reduce health care disparities. These data can be linked to assess technical quality (e.g., clinical measures) and service quality (e.g., wait times) within health care organizations. In addition, with accurate data, health care organizations can target resources such as interpreter services, patient educational materials, food and so on to provide higher quality health care to patients.

The Need for Self-Assessment

A national survey of hospitals conducted by HRET in 2005 and 2006 indicated that 60 percent of hospitals and systems either do not maintain a database of patients’ primary language that can be tracked over time or do not know if they track such data. More than 40 percent of respondents cited the need for self-assessment tools. The HRET disparities tool kit provides an inexpensive self-assessment tool for hospitals and systems and includes links to training presentations, survey templates and model approaches.

The survey also showed that more than 40 percent of hospitals and systems indicated their staff would find training on how to use data and how to collect data from patients useful. The disparities tool kit provides this information as well.

Links to Other Resources

Besides providing a uniform framework for collecting and using the data, as well as training presentations and model approaches, the tool kit includes a section on communicating with patients who are deaf or hard of hearing. In addition, the tool kit offers a comprehensive list of tools and resources to link tool-kit users to other tools and organizations, to guidelines and standards from the Joint Commission and U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and to resources on providing interpreter services and culturally competent care.

Cynthia Hedges Greising is staff writer for the Health Research & Educational Trust. For information on accessing the HRET disparities tool kit, please visit www.hretdisparities.org.

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This article 1st appeared on February 26, 2008 in HHN Magazine online site.

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