Abstract
BACKGROUND/AIMS: Racial and ethnic differences and disparities in health and healthcare are important issues that need to be documented in order for them to be adequately addressed. Yet, for a number of reasons, health plans often do not have such information at their disposal for a large proportion of their patients and are only now beginning to collect it more systematically. This study aims to document the current status of race and ethnicity data and provide guidance on methods for improving the measurement, quality, completeness, and analysis of this data for HMORN studies. METHODS: Participating managed care organizations (MCOs) will be surveyed to document sources of race and ethnicity information in MCO datasets, programming and variable coding methods, and descriptive statistics on these variables in order to describe current practices, uncover gaps in existing data, and note areas where methods can be standardized across all sites. A review of the literature will be conducted to identify existing and potential sources of race and ethnicity data for healthcare organizations and the reliability of these sources; determine methods of improving access to and collection of race and ethnicity data; and select suitable techniques for indirectly estimating missing race and ethnicity. The additional sources and estimation methods identified will be applied to the Vaccine Safety Datalink data at Kaiser Permanente Georgia and assessed for validity, improvements in the completeness of race and ethnicity data, and ease of use and robustness in analysis. The results of this assessment will be used to develop best practices that can inform the adoption of similar methods across HMORN sites.