Healthcare systems in the US bear the obligation to achieve a triad objective of improving the patient experience of care, including quality and satisfaction, improving public health services, and reducing the cost of care. Despite these considerations, Americans do not receive quality, timely, and affordable care due to the prevailing healthcare disparities.
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) (2021), a healthcare disparity is a “difference between population groups in the way they access, experience, and receive healthcare” (p. 193). In this sense, the synergies between ethnic, social, economic, environmental, and geographical factors contribute to inequalities regarding access to care, experiences, and quality of life.
Although the country enacts policies that ensure affordability, accessibility, and equality, eliminating ethnic and socio-economic disparities poses a public health challenge. Therefore, this proposal elaborates on strategies for measuring and assessing healthcare disparities, quality benchmarks, and evidence-based strategies for addressing the problem.
It is possible to measure and assess the problem of healthcare disparities by evaluating interactions between health and social determinants of health (SDOH), including age, education, neighborhood, employment, and population’s income levels. Also, it is essential to incorporate ethnic aspects because they influence access to quality care, experiences, and quality of life. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) (2021) presents six profound domains for assessing disparities. These considerations are:
Often, it is possible to determine the prevailing health disparities by comparing the community’s performance against top-performing communities and state or national benchmarks. As noted earlier, it is vital to assess and measure health disparities by evaluating inequalities within the six domains, including access to patient-centered care, the level of care coordination, care affordability, the availability of effective treatment, and healthy living.
Gomez et al. (2021) argue that conditions in which people live, learn, work, and worship, alongside their age and growth patterns, influence well-being outcomes, quality of life, and access to timely, affordability, and quality care. Therefore, the social determinants of health (SDOH) are the causative and contributing factors for health disparities.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) collaborates with other agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to document national and state benchmarks for the six domains. In this sense, it is possible to gauge communities’ performance regarding eliminating healthcare disparities by comparing their prevalence with states’ and national benchmarks.
One of the most profound benchmarks for healthcare disparities is the number of uninsured people of ethnic diversities. Carratala & Maxwell (2020) argue that about 10.6% of African Americans were uninsured compared with 5.9% of non-Hispanic Whites in 2017. Such statistics indicate ethnicity is a profound cause of disparities in care affordability and accessibility.
The stand unit for measuring health disparities entails often computing the total number of individuals with distinct characteristics against a predetermined population (1000, 100000, and so on). For example, healthcare professionals can calculate the total number of Black Americans with new cases of HIV by identifying the numbers of new cases per 100,000 people. Consequently, it is possible to compare the prevalence of disparities with achievable benchmarks.
Action Plan
Many scholarly and authoritative sources proposed evidence-based interventions for analyzing and addressing health disparities in patient safety, access to quality care, care affordability, quality of life, and care coordination. These interventions include:<
Struggling with online classes or exams? Get expert help to ace your coursework, assignments, and tests stress-free!