Ethnicity

Meaningful Use outlines twenty-four required objectives. Of the fourteen core measures, objective number seven regulates that both ethnicity AND race must be supplied by patients. There are no exclusions.

Rexpert needs to support Meaningful Use, so with the release of Rexpert 10 (R10), Account Registration has been updated to contain and specify these two fields.

The acceptable values for ethnicity are:

Note: Any account that fails to collect race or ethnicity data, thus recorded as Unspecified, will be suspended. However, patients may choose to not specify a race or ethnicity. This choice will be recorded as Refused to Specify and this will not suspend the account.

Now that Rexpert has been updated, we've done all we can on our end. Now, it’s up to you to implement this change into your practice. Here’s what you need to do:

• If Hispanic is listed as a Race on your encounter forms and/or in your Race table, you will need to remove it. According to Meaningful Use, Hispanic is not a race. Note: For all patients recorded in the system as a Hispanic race, we will change this field to an unspecified race. This field can then be updated at the time of the patient’s next appointment. This is confusing enough to us, and can be doubly so to patients who have grown up identifying their race as Hispanic. We have found a very good resource at WireQH which gives you scripts to follow when discussing this with your patients. This will be especially helpful to the front desk workers who need to directly interact with people who may be frustrated or upset.
• Be sure to update your encounter forms to include race, ethnicity, preferred language (to appear in the next release), interpreter required, and sex (as opposed to gender).
• Once you have made these changes, please print out a copy, black out identifying information, show us where you want ethnicity/race/language to appear, and fax it to 775-618-1358.

Why does this matter?  These questions are sometimes uncomfortable to ask and can make patients or staff feel awkward.  The NIH has a paper on this subject. The conclusion?  "If HCOs make a commitment to systematically collect race/ethnicity and language data from patients, it would be a major step in enhancing the ability of HCOs to monitor health care processes and outcomes for different population groups, target quality initiatives more efficiently and effectively, and provide patient-centered care."  We can only hope they are right!

Do you have any thoughts on the subject? Let us know in the Comment section below. And, as always, contact Client Services via the Feedback button if you have any questions, comments, or good ideas to share.