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Author:

Robin M.Weinick, Katherine Flaherty and Steffanie J. Bristol, The Disparities Solutions Center, Massachusetts General Hospital

This is a guide for hospitals planning to prepare equity reports. These reports identify ethnic and racial disparities in organizations and suggest ways to reduce them. The authors include case studies of hospitals that have already implemented equity reports.

What is an Equity Report?

What is New or Significant in this Report?

While this guide provides specific information and recommendations for hospital settings in the United States, the general lessons are useful and valuable for any agency seeking to enhance how they serve their community.

In our highly diverse society, it is essential, especially for newcomer-serving agencies, that we seek to examine inequalities in how we provide care to clients from different racial, ethnic, language, and socioeconomic groups.

Of course, we should be examining how we serve all equity-seeking and human rights protected groups. This guide provides some specific tools, measures and insights for the above groups. Other guides on this site provide additional insight to help you provide excellent and inclusive service to other groups.

An equity report is a tool that allows a hospital’s executives, physicians, and staff to examine inequalities in the care provided to patients from different racial, ethnic, language, and socioeconomic groups. In much the same way as a quality report, it can help identify areas where things are going well and those where there are opportunities for improvement, whether across the hospital, within a specific department, or for a specific patient group.

The report can also help with monitoring progress over time toward eliminating inequalities and providing the highest quality of care to all patients, regardless of their race, ethnicity, language, or socioeconomic status.

This guide focuses on the role of equity reports in reducing those disparities by helping health organizations to identify the inequalities in the care they provide and to monitor changes over time. While the majority of hospitals collect data on patients' race and ethnicity, few use the information to assess quality of care, health outcomes and patient satisfaction.

In preparing this guide to equity reports, the authors drew on the experiences of hospitals across the United States and make the following recommendations for any hospital planning to address potential inequalities in the care it provides:

  • Obtain management buy-in and the support of hospital leadership.
  • Determine which data will be collected and how they will be collected, used and stored.
  • Maintain integrity in the data collection process.
  • Include anecdotes that will bring the report to life.
  • Inform the public.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1: Why Create a Hospital Equity Report?
  • Chapter 2: Leading the Effort
  • Chapter 3: Collecting the Data: Race, Ethnicity, Language, and Socioeconomic Status
  • Chapter 4: Measures
  • Chapter 5: Presenting the Data
  • Chapter 6: Using the Report

Language: English

Format: This guide is available for download in PDF format (1.1 MB, 78 pages).

This page last updated:
Thursday, May 08, 2008