Mass General Hits Health Equality via Demographic Data Collection

Mass General Brigham has announced the launch of a campaign to collect more accurate and complete demographic data from the hospital’s more than one million adult primary care patients. This demographic data will consist of information such as ethnicity, age, and medical history.

With the provided information, medical professionals will use it in determining a patient’s vulnerability to certain illnesses and which treatments will be most effective for them. The goal of this campaign is to improve access to healthcare programs and services and provide more equitable care for everyone.

The hospital’s current data for patient's race/ethnicity/language has about a 20 percent rate of missing data depending on the location. Mass General Brigham’s new goal is to have a less than 5 percent rate of missing data across the primary care population.

“There are very clear inequities between patients based on their race, ethnicity and whether English is their primary language,” said Allison Bryant, MD MPH, Senior Medical Director for Health Equity at Mass General Brigham in a press release. “Without quality data, our decision-making falls flat about how we equitably distribute programs and services.”

Starting this June, Mass General Brigham’s Quality & Patient Experience and United Against Racism teams are conducting an outreach campaign that will encourage patients to report their demographic information to the hospital. The outreach campaign is being directed via mail, with digital message follow-ups through the patient portal.

With this campaign, the team at Mass General Brigham is hoping to eliminate reporting patient’s ethnicity or gender identity based solely on their physical appearance. In other words, the health system has its sights set on patient-reported data.

While sharing data will remain optional, patients will encourage to share race, ethnic background, and language (REaL); sexual orientation, gender identity, sex assigned at birth, and pronouns (SOGI); and disability and accommodation needs.

This demographic data will play an important role in the decision-making process to improve care access. The improvements could include “availability of languages and interpreters to help patients; development of new online healthcare tools; and additional assistance for patients to help access food, medicine, accommodations, and other needs,” according to the press release.

The demographic data provided by patients will remain secure and only accessible by patients’ clinicians, clinical support staff, and the quality improvement staff. Information and medical records will remain protected under HIPPA law.

Mass General Brigham’s Quality & Patient Experience and United Against Racism teams will work with clinicians across the system to assist patients who may be hesitant about sharing their information understand how doing so will help improve health equity.

“Ultimately, this data will help inform how we improve care for vulnerable patients and foster ongoing, equitable changes across our healthcare system,” Mass General Brigham stated in the press release.