Anne C. Beal, Senior Program Officer, The Commonwealth Fund;
Bruce Siegel, MD, MPH, Professor, George Washington University;
Romana Hasnain-Wynia, PhD, Vice President, Research, Health Research and Educational Trust, AHA

      Evidence demonstrating the impact of quality improvement (QI) on health disparities and the potential unintended effects of QI will be presented. This session will also describe how to apply the Institute of Medicine framework for the quality of care to disparities, the importance of collecting race and ethnicity data, and how to link those data with clinical performance measures to identify disparities in quality. Presentations include reports of projects in which the Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA) indicators were linked with race/ethnicity measures and used to determine where disparities did and did not occur.
      After this presentation you will be able to:

• Describe how quality improvement can be used to address health disparities.
• Discuss the collection of race and ethnicity data as a useful method for identifying disparities.
• Explain how HQA Hospital Quality Indicators can be used to identify disparities in quality.