Collecting Race, Ethnicity and Primary Language Data in Physician Practices: The Minnesota Community Measurement Experience

Disparities in care can occur within a wide range of health care settings and are associated with lower quality of care and higher mortality among racial and ethnic minorities and individuals with limited English proficiency. To reduce disparities in care and develop appropriate interventions, health care organizations first need to identify where and why they exist; hospitals, physician practices, and health plans can start by systematically collecting patients’ race, ethnicity, and language data to provide a basic foundation for measuring and monitoring care for different groups over time.1 However, systematically collecting these data remain a challenge for most health care organizations.