Let ’s Adapt Health Care Quality Measures To Meet The Needs Of Transgender People

Editor’s Note: This month’s issue of Health Affairs also features a personal essay by a transgender doctor about meeting the health care needs of transgender patients. As transgender people become increasingly visible, so have the challenges they face in our health care system. In response, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) recommends better educating providers on how to competently care for transgender patients, and the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) recommends collecting gender identity information in electronic medical records and conducting more research around transgender health. Moreover, recent findings suggest that some health care quality measures inappropriately include or exclude transgender people and are not tailored to address the unique needs of this population. The US health care system must adapt current quality measures to transgender individuals to achieve the recommendations of the National Academy of Medicine and the AAMC. Problematic Health Care Quality Measures Some health care quality measures use sex designations to identify which patients should be measured (for instance, measures that assess the percentage of patients screened for breast, prostate, or cervical cancers). Using sex to identify populations for quality measurement improperly excludes or includes transgender patients, since a transgender person’s sex-identifier may not accurately represent their physiology. Furthermore, the measure s...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Featured Health Equity Population Health Quality Alternative Payment Models equality LGBT health quality measures transgender health Source Type: blogs