Friday, January 18, 2008

Health Disparities, Cultural Competency Resource

Processes and outcomes of patient care are well-documented across numerous populations. Therefore, collecting accurate data on patients' race, ethnicity, and primary language is critical to improve quality of care.

The Health Research and Educational Trust Disparities Toolkit team has released an updated web based Toolkit. The Toolkit provides hospitals, health systems, clinics, and health plans information and resources for systematically collecting race, ethnicity, and primary language data from patients.

HRET's Disparities Toolkit, offered for free to registered users, is a useful educational tool about the importance of data collection, how to implement a framework to collect the data, and how to use these data to improve quality of care for all populations.

To read more about the toolkit and to register go to the Health Research and Education Trust website.