Graham: EHRs will offer clues to racial, ethnic disparities

The Health & Human Services Department hopes to exploit electronic heath record systems to reduce the persistent gap in health outcomes that exists between minority communities and the rest of population, an HHS official said today.

Health IT and other technologies would enable providers to collect and share data to help identify minority and underserved patients and keep them from falling through cracks in the healthcare system, said Dr. Garth Graham, deputy assistant secretary for HHS’s Office of Minority Health.

“We need more data (and) electronic health records are one of the tools that can help us collect better data,” he said at a conference today sponsored by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society as part of Health IT Week. HIMSS owns Government Health IT magazine.

Physicians can include more pieces of information about a patient’s racial, ethnic and language ability in a patient’s electronic health record, Graham said. That data can be scrubbed of personally identifying information and shared with agencies that are trying to determine approaches to overcome persistent gaps in care, he said.

HHS has intensified its efforts to close the outcomes gap by working with the National Health IT Collaborative, a public/private partnership that aims to bring the benefits of electronic health records and other health IT to underserved population and their providers, Graham said.

Reducing disparities among minority and underserved populations in urban and rural areas is a top priority of the administration, Graham said.

“The life expectancy in some urban pockets in New York and in rural Mississippi may be even lower than in some of sub-Sahara Africa,” he said. “Life expectancy may be 15 years less than the general U.S. population.” Health disparities are a complicated problem that will not be solved with just more access to healthcare or improving socio-economic status.  “It’s not just geography,” he said. “Some of same problems with access to care in Tupelo, Miss, are the same as for those in poverty-stricken areas in Manhattan.”

Part of the challenge rests with providers, he said.

“One of the ingredients of disparities in the provision of healthcare is that many providers that serve underserved communities don’t have the basic tools, such as the ability to refer their patients to specialists’ care,’ he said.

Health IT may not repair all such shortcomings, he noted. “(When) you provide those tools, if you were a not-so-good doctor before you had those tools, you’re a not-so-good doctor after you get those tools,” he said. “These are not transformational technologies.”

However, more data is better, he said. “If you don’t document the problem, and folks aren’t captured in data collection, then they don’t exist,” Graham said. “As we capture the data, we will need to identity what needs to be done,” he said.