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Background
Nationally and within Wisconsin, disparities in healthcare exist across multiple determinants of health including race and ethnicity, socioeconomic status, health insurance coverage, and geography (rural and urban). Public reporting on disparities in the quality of care is an important step to achieving accountability for reducing disparities over time and has been associated with improvements in care. Already a leader in public reporting of the quality of care, the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (the “Collaborative”) is now considering publicly reporting quality measures separately for populations experiencing health disparities. Because the Collaborative publicly reports on health system quality twice each year, there is a significant opportunity to enhance this regular reporting with reports on disparities in the quality of care. However, data on disparity indicators (i.e., race, ethnicity, and language) are often not available, not complete, or not completely reliable. This toolkit presents the best practices for collecting, analyzing, and reporting disparity data, and recommends a method of measurement for health systems.
Who should use this toolkit?
This toolkit is intended for large-scale collaboratives and health systems interested in collecting, analyzing, and reporting data by disparity indicators.
What does the toolkit contain?
A document containing information on collecting and submitting race, ethnicity, payer, and address data.
How should these tools be used?
The materials in this toolkit can be used to:
- identify disparity measures for public reporting
- provide guidance on collecting and submitting data elements for public reporting of disparity indicators
Development of this toolkit
The Guide for Collecting and Submitting Disparity Indicators toolkit was developed by staff at the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality.
Funding Organization
The Wisconsin Partnership Program (WPP) was established at the School of Medicine and Public Health in 2004 through a generous and visionary endowment gift from Blue Cross and Blue Shield United of Wisconsin’s conversion to a stock insurance corporation. Its mission is to improve the public health needs of Wisconsin and reduce health disparities through initiatives in research, education, and community partnerships. The Wisconsin Health Disparities Report was funded by WPP through a grant to HIP and WCHQ.
Please send questions, comments and suggestions to HIPxChange@hip.wisc.edu.
Toolkit Citation
Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality. Guide for Collecting and Submitting Disparity Indicators. Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality. Madison, WI; 2023. Available at: https://www.hipxchange.org/DisparityIndicators
About the Authors
The Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ) is a voluntary, non-profit consortium of organizations committed to using the public reporting of comparative measures of performance to catalyze improvements in the quality and affordability of healthcare in our state, and the health status of individuals and communities.
WCHQ designs and facilitates collaborative learning activities to promote the sharing of “best practices” among healthcare provider organizations in an effort to elevate and accelerate improvement across Wisconsin.