A consistent framework has been developed for measuring health disparities and making comparisons across indicators with regard to the public health goals of Healthy People 2010. Disparities are measured as the percent difference from the best group rate, with all indicators being expressed in terms of adverse events. The 10 largest health disparities for each of five US racial and ethnic group...

he current debate about health care reform has centered primarily on controlling the cost of health care and health insurance access. The third essential component of health policy — health care quality — must be addressed as well. Despite a lack of media attention, health care quality initiatives are significant components of health care reform. However, racial and ethnic health care dispariti...

PURPOSE To characterize attitudes of residents toward racial/ethnic disparities in health care and to explore the effect of a simple intervention to improve awareness of these disparities. METHODS The authors surveyed residents in internal and emergency medicine rotating through the Coronary Care Unit of a major teaching hospital about their attitudes toward disparities in cardiovascular care...

A consistent framework has been developed for measuring health disparities and making comparisons across indicators with regard to the public health goals of Healthy People 2010. Disparities are measured as the percent difference from the best group rate, with all indicators being expressed in terms of adverse events. The 10 largest health disparities for each of five US racial and ethnic group...

The existence of overall racial and ethnic disparities in health care is well documented, but this average effect masks variation across regions and types of care. Medicare claims data are used to document the extent of these variations. Regions with high racial disparities in one procedure are not more likely to be high in other procedures. Unusually large racial disparities in surgery are oft...

In its study of racial and ethnic disparities in health care, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) concluded that there were large and significant disparities in the quality and quantity of health care received by minority groups in the United States. This article shows that where a patient lives can itself have a large impact on the level and quality of health care the patient receives. Since black...

and Quality (AHRQ) has annually reported on progress and opportunities for improving health care quality and reducing health care disparities. As mandated by the U.S. Congress, the National Healthcare Quality Report (NHQR) focuses on “national trends in the quality of health care provided to the American people” while the National Healthcare Disparities Report (NHDR) focuses on “prevailing disp...

Non-Hispanic whites are significantly more likely to have health insurance coverage than most racial/ethnic minorities, and this differential grew during the 1990s. Similarly, wealthier Americans are more likely to have health insurance than the poor, and this difference also grew over the 1990s. This paper examines the role of provider competition in increasing these disparities in insurance c...

The 2005 National Health Disparities Report found disparities related to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status in the United States health-care system. While varying in magnitude, disparities were observed in almost all aspects of health care including cancer. Disparities were noted across quality and access to health care, levels and types of health care, various health-care settings, and ...

Objective This study evaluates whether different dimensions of physiological dysregulation, modeled individually rather than additively mediate racial/ethnic disparities in self-reported health. Methods Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2005-2010) and the Karlson, Hold, and Breen (KHB) mediation model, this paper explores what operationalization of biomarke...