The Uniform Hospital Discharge Data Set (UHDDS) is considered as a standard form of patient data collection created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Garvin et al. (2009) cite UHDDS as the only tool for collecting data about race and ethnicity, helping examine health disparities of minorities. In this article, limitations of UHDDS in relation to race and ethnicity are discussed, and the main purpose is to disclose the implicit issues within the healthcare system that obstruct people from getting universally high-quality care. The relevance of UHDDS is connected to its uniform use and comparable patient data categories, allowing to use of information from UHDDS with other data sheets, for example, with Uniform Ambulatory Care.
Two items that I learned are the different treatment in terms of care quality that people of varied ethnicities receive and the changes to the datasheet that need to be made to capture the ethnicities correctly. Garvin et al. (2009) mention that previous studies using UHDDS targeting the problem of quality of care for minorities revealed that they typically receive a lower quality of care. These outcomes compared people of minorities with other individuals receiving healthcare services and accounted for factors such as insurance, income, and others that could affect the results. The second thing is that some people may not understand the difference or relevance of categories ethnicity and race or use broad categories, for example, Asian, making it necessary to adjust data sheets such as UHDDS to collect data more accurately.
Reference
Garvin, H. J., Jones, T. D., & Washington, L. (2009). Data collection and reporting for healthcare disparities. HIM Body of Knowledge.