Why is the health plan collection of data on race/ethnicity so important?
The importance of the health plan sector collecting this data is to look at population-based medicine programs. This isn’t just up to health plans. Health plans are only one group. We need to do this with hospitals, with medical groups, with physicians so that we have a robust system of understanding the population that we serve. It’s the responsibility of all of us in the health care sector to learn about these populations, identify who they are, and create the appropriate programs to help them. Q: What is most notable to you in these findings? A: For plans not collecting such data, the reasons they gave are the same reasons that we’ve been hearing for the last couple of years. This means we have targeted reasons, and we should work on addressing them. The reasons include enrollee resistance. So we need to get more information to consumers about why it’s important to have this data and how it will be used. We know that consumers need to understand how the information is going to be us
