This article examines the potential role of health IT in addressing healthcare disparities among racial and ethnic minority populations. An overview of health IT utilization among healthcare providers notes certain characteristics that may disproportionately affect minority populations. Current and emerging health IT use among racial and ethnic minority populations is examined, highlighting are...

PURPOSE To explore whether contextual variables attenuate disparities in weight among 18,639 US children and adolescents aged 2 to 18 years participating in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2001 to 2010. METHODS Disparities were assessed using the Symmetrized Rényi Index, a new measure that summarizes disparities in the severity of a disease, as well as the prevalence, ac...

is the current phase of the Healthy People Initiative, which began in 1979 with the vision of making America's communities healthier and happier places (http:⁄⁄www.healthypeople. gov). Healthy People 2010 is a comprehensive set of health objectives to be achieved over the fi rst decade of the century. The overarching goals are to increase the quality of life and years of healthy life for all Am...

OBJECTIVES The study assessed the progress made toward reducing racial and ethnic disparities in access to health care among U.S. children between 1996 and 2000. METHODS Data are from the Household Component of the 1996 and 2000 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Bivariate associations of combinations of race/ethnicity and poverty status groups were examined with four measures of access to hea...

Finding ways to deliver high-quality health care to an increasingly diverse population is a major challenge for the American health care system. The persistence of racial and ethnic disparities in health care access, quality, and outcomes has prompted considerable interest in increasing the cultural competence of health care, both as an end in its own right and as a potential means to reduce di...

Pain in the United States is widely recognized to be undertreated; however, the capacity to treat pain has never been greater.2 The causes of this undertreatment are varied. As we focus on pain and why it is too often ineffectively treated, we also discover that this undertreatment afflicts some more than others. What divides the some from the others isn’t limited to one factor, but one particu...

Research on racial/ethnic health disparities and socioeconomic position has not fully considered occupation. However, because occupations are racially patterned, certain occupational characteristics may explain racial/ethnic difference in health. This study examines the role of occupational characteristics in racial/ethnic disparities in all-cause mortality. Data are from a U.S. community-based...

In 2003 the Institute of Medicine (IOM) was charged by Congress to examine racial and ethnic disparities in health care. Their landmark report, “Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare,” brought the issue of health care disparities to national attention. The report concluded that “Racial and ethnic minorities tend to receive a lower quality of healthcare than ...

Prior research suggests that stigma plays a role in racial/ethnic health disparities. However, there is limited understanding about the mechanisms by which stigma contributes to HIV-related disparities in risk, incidence and screening, treatment, and survival and what can be done to reduce the impact of stigma on these disparities. We introduce the Stigma and HIV Disparities Model to describe h...

T he Agency for Health Care Research and Quality will soon release its annual report on racial and ethnic disparities in health care. In the three years since that report first appeared, there has been some slow improvement in some areas for some ethnic groups. But there is still troubling evidence that racial and ethnic disparities still pervade health care in the U.S. despite many efforts to ...