Improving Health Care Quality and Cost-Effectiveness

The Racial/Ethnic Health Care Equity Initiative is one of three key efforts of the High-Value Health Care Project underway by the Brookings Institution's Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform. The High-Value Health Care Project is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The goal of the Racial/Ethnic Health Care Equity Initiative is to improve quality-of-care measurements for diverse racial/ethnic groups to more effectively address disparities. Health plans face a unique challenge to meeting this goal because self-reported data about individual plan member race/ethnicity are generally unavailable or limited. State-of-the art methods for direct data collection are being developed but until they become available, practical, cost-effective interim solutions to infer race/ethnicity are needed.

As part of this initiative, RAND is validating and pilot testing a method it developed to indirectly estimate race/ethnicity. This method is a key component of the Q-DART toolset. RAND is working with select health plans to test the method's practical application so that operators of administrative health care databases and/or their contractors can use it effectively.

RAND will present preliminary project results along with details about its indirect estimation methodology at a national conference on health care equity to be convened by Brookings' Engelberg Center in October 2009. Date and location of this conference will be posted on this website as soon as the information is available.