Abstract
ABSTRACT.Human migration and travel are leading to increasingly diverse populations throughout the world. Data collection practices need to adapt to these changes to expand our understanding of health disparities and to optimize the efforts to address health equity, particularly during public health emergencies such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. Race and ethnicity classifications in the United States have failed to evolve since the 1970s despite an increasingly diverse population. Current commonly collected categories are inadequate to accurately describe the economic, educational, and sociopolitical circumstances of different groups. Further, these categories lend little practical information to inform health policy. More predictive and actionable variables should be routinely collected to improve appropriateness and timeliness of health interventions. The immediate adoption of the collection of primary/preferred language and country of birth/origin by public health organizations, health systems, and clinical providers would be a concrete and valuable first step.
Highlights
Modern travel and migration patterns have facilitated increasingly diverse populations, in common destination countries such as the United States
Current categories for classifying individuals by race and ethnicity for federal statistics were defined in a 1978 Office of Management and Budget directive, “Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal Statistics and Administrative Reporting.”[3]. This standardization of race/ethnicity data collection has proved crucial in unveiling stark disparities in morbidity, mortality, healthcare access, and utilization across broad racial and ethnic groups.[4]
Addressing social health inequities demands more granular data that can more precisely identify the groups that are disproportionately impacted by the conditions of concern, are better proxies for underlying drivers of health disparities, and which provide more actionable data to inform public health organizations, health systems, and clinical providers
Summary
Modern travel and migration patterns have facilitated increasingly diverse populations, in common destination countries such as the United States. In the United States, refugees, immigrants, and migrants alone account for approximately 13.7% of all residents, or approximately 45 million people.[1] The current broad race/ethnicity labels to which these individuals are assigned fail to identify differential risks between these very distinct groups.
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