The Medicare Managed Care (MMC) Consumer Assessment of Health Plans Study (CAHPS) survey offers an opportunity to examine differences in health plan experiences and patterns of use of services of racial and ethnic minority beneficiaries enrolled in health plans. Analysis of the survey data and review of prior literature indicate significant health disparities and different patterns of health ca...

In light of the increasing interest in documenting and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health, a pressing need exists for appropriate methods to measure these disparities at the local level. The authors measured county-level disparity in heart disease mortality between African Americans and whites in South Carolina during 1996– 2000, modelled via an extension of a spatial hierarchi...

The focus on eliminating racial/ethnic health disparities has brought critical attention to the poor health status of minority populations. Assessing the health outcomes of racial minority groups by comparing them to a racial majority standard is valuable for identifying and monitoring health inequities, but may not be the most effective approach to identifying strategies that can be used to im...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether there would be racial and ethnic disparities in meeting eligibility criteria for medication therapy management (MTM) services implemented in 2006 for Medicare beneficiaries. DATA SOURCES/STUDY SETTING Secondary data analyses of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (2004-2005). STUDY DESIGN Logistic regression and recycled predictions were used to test the disp...

Few studies have examined geographic variation in hypertension disparities, but studies of other health outcomes indicate that racial residential segregation may help to explain these variations. The authors used data from 8,071 black and white participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (1999-2006) who were aged 25 years or older to investigate whether black-white hype...

BACKGROUND Racial and ethnic disparities in health care have been consistently documented in the diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes of many common clinical conditions. There has been an acceleration of health information technology (HIT) implementation in the United States, with health care reform legislation including multiple provisions for collecting and using health information to improve a...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES A commonly cited explanation of how racial discrimination impacts health is the biopsychosocial model. However, the biopsychosocial model does not allow for the effects of perceived provider discrimination on health behavior and utilization. In fact, researchers have directed relatively little attention toward the direct and indirect effects of perceived provider discr...

Research links Black-White health disparities to racial differences in socioeconomic status (SES), but understanding of the role of SES in racial health gaps has been restricted by reliance on static measures of health and socioeconomic well-being that mask the dynamic quality of these processes and ignore the racialized nature of the SES-health connection. Utilizing twenty-three years of longi...

We examine the ways in which racial differences in health vary over the income-wealth distribution, comparing the self-reported health status of non-Hispanic whites with those of individuals of other races and ethnicities. Paradoxically, we find that although the largest unadjusted racial differences in health are between poor whites and poor nonwhites, after adjusting for income, wealth, and o...

Eliminating health disparities is one of two overarching goals of Healthy People 2010. Although the causes of health disparities are complex, they appear to be related, in part, to disparities in the quality of medical care. Two recent reviews of peer-reviewed research investigated the evidence on racial/ethnic differences in medical care. An Institute of Medicine summary of the literature conc...