Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care
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Ever since the Institute of Medicine published Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care (Smedley, Stith, and Nelson, 2002), it has remained the clearest and most comprehensive articulation of what was already apparent to many in health care: that health outcomes vary by race and ethnicity.

Unequal Treatment established unequivocally that disparities occur due to differential treatment within clinical settings of members of different races and ethnicities. In so doing, the report marked a turning point for the study of health care disparities. "The real challenge lies not in debating whether disparities exist because the evidence is overwhelming," said Alan Nelson, chair of the Committee on Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. Now the health care field needs to focus on "developing and implementing strategies to reduce and eliminate [disparities]."

The first step in this process is to pinpoint the factors that lead to different outcomes. Why do African American patients tend to receive less aggressive treatment for heart disease? Why do Hispanics tend to be subjected to less desirable procedures for conditions like diabetes? Is it a function of bias on the part of the physician, suspicion or lack of familiarity on the part of the patient, communication barriers?
These questions are guiding HRET's research in disparities in health care. Working with a consortium of six leading hospitals and health systems and our National Advisory Panel, HRET developed a program called "Eliminating Disparities through Community and Hospital Partnerships" that will be a critical part of the effort to eliminate health disparities.

Through the generous support of the Commonwealth Fund and the consortium’s members, the first phase of this project has been completed.  HRET in collaboration with Northwestern Memorial Hospital (NMH) developed a framework and toolkit for Collecting Race, Ethnicity, and Primary Language Information from Patients.  NMH has successfully implemented this framework.  In addition, HRET is working with a number of hospitals/healthsystems and other organizations across the country to improve systematic data collection.