Healthcare providers can collect and report race and ethnicity data as part of a program of quality improvement, says a policy brief prepared for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation by several faculty at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services Department of Health Policy. In the absence of federal guidelines on disclosure of these data, providers have been concerned that they may be violating federal civil rights laws and state human rights laws by collecting patient ethnic and racial information. But the brief states that such data are vital to understanding and eliminating disparities in healthcare, and they are used by CMS, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and the Veterans Administration in efforts to improve quality. “The act of examining disparities as part of quality improvement becomes the higher form of civil rights compliance; in effect, the goal of health care quality improvement simply cannot be realized without addressing equality in the rendering of health care treatment,” write the authors.
