Article highlights:
- ONC announced its health IT demographic EHR certification requirements to standardize race and ethnicity data collection in the pursuit of health equity. ONC outlined that the agency’s “demographics” certification criterion requires health IT to record race and ethnicity at the same level of detail as the CDC’s Race & Ethnicity code technology. This system encompasses over 900 concepts for race and ethnicity, giving patients precise options for self-identifying their demographic information.
- The technology must also be capable of coding multiple races and ethnicities for a patient in the EHR. This allows individuals to report their race and ethnicity in a manner that most closely aligns to how they self-identify, ONC noted (i.e. Japanese-Indian as opposed to Asian American). ONC called for healthcare providers to work with their health IT developer to implement a strategy for recording race and ethnicity that best supports the populations they serve.
- ONC acknowledged that while data can be helpful in the pursuit of health equity, it understands that datasets can perpetuate inequity as well. “ONC recognizes the potential for data-driven technologies, including certified health IT, to impact health equity,” the agency wrote. “Further, ONC recognizes that ‘structural inequalities, biases, and racism in society are easily encoded in datasets,’ and that data science practices using race and ethnicity data ‘can reinforce existing social injustices, and health inequalities.’”
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