Webinar 1: REL Data

Romana Hasnain-Wynia, PhD, Director, Center for Healthcare Equity, Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine; and Committee Member, Institute of Medicine Committee on Standardized Collection of Race/Ethnicity/Language Data for Healthcare Quality Improvement

 

Dr. Hasnain-Wynia will talk about why standardized data collection is important for reducing disparities in health care, and review the IOM recommendations and their implications for health care providers. 

Grace H. Ting, MHA, Health Services Director, Programs in Clinical Excellence, Clinical Health Policy, WellPoint, Inc., Thousand Oaks, CA

 

Ms. Ting will discuss how the IOM’s recommendations can support collaboration in health systems to reduce health care disparities. Using WellPoint’s experiences as an example, she will discuss how existing quality improvement initiatives can use data exchange and the practical applications of race, ethnicity and language data in joint quality improvement initiatives between health plans and physicians.

 

Moderated by Julia Puebla Fortier, Executive Director, Resources for Cross Cultural Health Care and Project Director of the DiversityRx ‘Your Voice’ project.

Dr. Hasnain-Wynia is a national expert in health care disparities research. She is the director of the Center for Healthcare Equity and Associate Professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Prior to joining Northwestern University, Dr. Hasnain-Wynia was the Vice President of Research for the Health Research and Educational Trust/American Hospital Association.  She serves as the principal investigator of a number of studies focusing on research, implementation, and evaluation projects using multi-method approaches to reduce disparities in health care and to examine the health care safety net. She is a member of the evaluation team of the Robert Wood Johnson initiative, Aligning Forces for Quality and is leading the disparities/equity component of the evaluation. Dr. Hasnain-Wynia was the lead author of the HRET Disparities Toolkit for Collecting Race, Ethnicity, and Primary Language Data from Patients, which has been endorsed by the National Quality Forum. She serves on a number of national expert advisory panels and is a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Standardized Collection of Race/Ethnicity/Language Data for Healthcare Quality Improvement. Dr. Hasnain-Wynia is a Senior Associate Editor for the journal, Health Services Research.

 

Grace H. Ting, MHA, CHIE has served as Health Services Director, Clinical Health Policy and Strategic Initiatives under the Chief Medical Officer’s Division at WellPoint, Inc. since 1992.  Over the past four years, Ms. Ting’s work has focused exclusively on setting the corporate agenda to address and reduce health status disparities.  Besides leading a centralized analytic unit to provide health disparities analyses and mapping to assist WellPoint’s health plans in quality improvement initiatives and business planning efforts, she is also responsible for developing and implementing enterprise-wide initiatives and pilots for members, providers, communities-at-large and WellPoint associates to address racial/ethnic health disparities. Ms. Ting received her Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the University of California at Los Angeles, and her Master of Health Administration degree from the University of Southern California.

 

The DiversityRx Webinar Series is part of the ‘Your Voice’ project, funded by The California Endowment. The project also features Communities of Practice, Peer Learning Networks, and an online professional education and support network.