INDIANAPOLIS – The Indiana Minority Health Coalition (IMHC) announced its new REAL OnlineTraining Series: Collecting and Using Patient Race, Ethnicity and Language (REAL) Information to Promote Health Care Equity. The training will help health care institutions and professionals implement a standardized system for collecting REL information, which the federal Affordable Care Act requires to be in place by 2014. This series was supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to the Central Indiana Alliance for Health.
“Collecting race, ethnicity and language data will help to develop better programs and services for our racial and ethnic minority communities,” said Nancy Jewell, IMHC’s president and CEO. “If we want to deliver equal care for all patients, we need to have a thorough understanding of who we are serving.”
The federal Affordable Care Act outlines new standards in collecting REL data and mandates its implementation by 2014. The REAL training series will officially launch in October and is designed to educate health care professionals at all levels on the need and how to best collect REL data. Hospitals, physicians’ offices and even community organizations delivering health care services will be encouraged to participate in the training. The Indiana Hospital Association will roll out the training to all of its members in the coming months.
“We need to make sure all of Indiana’s health care professionals are asking the right questions,” said Bernice Ulrich, Indiana Hospital Association’s vice president of data services. “This training will provide the tools necessary to collect sound data that can help our state’s health care system tailor its efforts in serving allpatients.”
In creating the training, the REAL team – IMHC, Health Care Excel, Indiana University School of Medicine and its Bowen Research Center within the Department of Family Medicine – conducted focus groups with community members representing diverse racial and ethnic groups to identify optimal setting and placement of the messages about REL data collection and use in healthcare systems. The group will also launch a public communications campaign to inform consumers about the collection and how itwill be used in health care systems.
The training series will be available at REALindiana.org and through IHA’s website at ihaconnect.org. Materials such as posters, brochures and frequently asked questions will also be available.
