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Reducing racial and ethnic disparities in health care: an integral part of quality improvement scholarship

¹ Department of Medicine, Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
² Department of Pediatrics, Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Correspondence to:
Dr M H Chin
University of Chicago, 5841 South Maryland Avenue, MC 2007, Chicago, IL 60637, USA; mchin@medicine.bsd.uchicago.edu

Keywords: quality improvement; ethnicity; race; equity; disparities

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

We advocate three fundamental additions to the draft guidelines for quality improvement (QI) manuscripts proposed by Davidoff and Batalden.¹ The purpose of these additions is to highlight the opportunity that the guidelines offer for reducing racial and ethnic disparities in health care.

Equity is one of the six quality aims defined by the US Institute of Medicine in their 2001 report "Crossing the Quality Chasm", along with safety, effectiveness, patient centeredness, timeliness, and efficiency.² So far, effectiveness has been a frequent target of QI programs. Clearly, effectiveness is an important goal, but addressing equity offers great opportunities for profound improvement for both individual patients and society as a whole.

Racial inequity in health care is common to many pluralistic societies and is increasingly regarded as unacceptable. The Institute of Medicine’s 2003 report "Unequal Treatment" documented substantial racial and ethnic . . . [Full text of this article]

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