HHS to Pour $90M Into Data-Driven Efforts to Combat Health Disparities

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the availability of $90 million from the American Rescue Plan to fund data-driven efforts by Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)-supported health centers to address health disparities.

HRSA-designated health centers serve medically underserved communities, which are often disproportionately affected by public health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. These health centers serve one in five people living in rural areas and one in 11 people nationwide. Over 90 percent of these patients live at or below 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines, and almost 63 percent of patients are racial or ethnic minorities.

“Health centers are vital to increasing equitable access to primary healthcare,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in the press release. “The Biden-Harris Administration has made historic investments in health centers, and this funding from President Biden’s American Rescue Plan will further enable health centers to utilize data to meet the needs of their community and help reduce gaps in care.”

HRSA’s data collection and reporting initiative, Uniform Data System Patient-Level Submission (UDS+), aims to enable health centers to tailor their efforts to address health outcomes and equity issues by more precisely targeting the needs of their patients and communities. UDS+ is designed to collect data on social determinants of health and improve data quality reporting processes for health centers.

“HRSA’s funding has supported our nation’s health centers in becoming leaders in leveraging the latest technology and data to provide high-quality care to individuals and communities who have been historically underserved,” said HRSA Administrator Carole Johnson in the press release. “Today’s announcement builds on this work and will help health centers modernize their data tools to improve equitable access to care and continue to best meet the needs of the communities and patients they serve.”

The $90 million can also be used to modify, enhance, and expand healthcare services and infrastructure by improving health information technology, enhancing data collection, and supporting related staff training. Further, the funding can be used to advance COVID-19 response, mitigation, and recovery efforts.

The enhancements made with this funding to health centers’ infrastructure will enable them to identify, measure, investigate, and address disparities in healthcare use and outcomes using demographic data, according to the press release. Standardizing patient-level data will allow health centers to identify populations most at risk for health disparities and inform potential clinical interventions.

In addition, health centers’ ability to collect, house, and report this standardized data can help bolster their participation in population health surveillance during public health emergencies.

The funding announcement follows the launch of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA) by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). CFA seeks to improve outbreak and public health threat response by utilizing infectious disease modeling and data analytics to enable timely, effective decision making by leaders at the federal, state, and local levels. CFA also plans to develop a program for giving infectious disease event insights to the public to aid individual decision making.