HRSA’s https://www.hrsa.gov supported health centers serve medically underserved populations and communities which are often disproportionately affected by COVID. Health Centers serve 1 in 5 people living in rural communities and 1 in 11 people nationwide.
More than 90% of HRSA-funded health center patients are individuals or families living at or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines, and nearly 63% are racial or ethnic minorities.
HRSA through the American Rescue Plan funding has made available nearly $90 million to support new data-driven efforts for HRSA’s Health Center Program to be able to identify and reduce health disparities.
HRSA’s modernized data collection and reporting initiative, called Uniform Data System Patient-Level Submission (USD+), is designed to collect more and better data on social determinants of health while also able to streamline and improve data quality reporting for health centers. This initiative will enable health centers to tailor their efforts to improve health outcomes and advance health equity, more precisely by targeting the needs of specific communities of patients.
The funding can be used for various COVID-19 activities and for modifying, enhancing, and expanding healthcare services by improving health information technology, enhancing data collection, and supporting related staff training. This will also help prepare for future public health emergencies.
The health centers are going to support patient-level reporting so that it will be easier to identify, measure, and investigate disparities in healthcare use and health outcomes by race, ethnicity, age, and other important demographic factors, and be able to more precisely target their resources accordingly.
Standardization of patient level health data will enable the identification of population most at risk for health disparities and will provide data to inform potential clinical interventions. Also, the ability to collect, house, and report standardized patient level health data will help to support health centers’ participation in critical population health surveillance activities during public health emergencies.