An HHS collaboration to improve quality of care for diverse patients

Increasingly diverse racial, ethnic, and sociocultural backgrounds of patients, colleagues, and staff present challenges to health care providers as they strive to deliver care to their patients. Cultural and language differences between patients and providers may engender misunderstanding, a lack of compliance, or other factors that negatively influence clinical situations and the health outcomes of our nation's diverse populations. A growing body of evidence about the existence of racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care has positioned cultural competence as a national health concern.

The Office of Minority Health (OMH) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services developed the National Standards for Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in Health Care as a means to correct inequities that currently exist in the provision of health services and to make these services more responsive to the individual needs of all patients. As a follow-up initiative to assist health care organizations in the adoption of the CLAS standards and to equip providers with the competencies that will enable them to better treat the increasingly diverse population, OMH developed A Physician's Practical Guide to Culturally Competent Care. This educational program is a self-directed online curriculum accredited for continuing education credits for physicians, nurses, and pharmacists.

In a breakthrough collaboration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) and OMH have partnered together to promote quality health care for racial and linguistic minority communities and to confront the growing problem of health disparities. The initiative is part of the 8th Statement of Work for the QIOs and is designed to: reduce health disparities, increase the adoption of CLAS standards in physician office practices, and provide cultural competency training to individual physicians.

The OMH curriculum was chosen as the ‘program of choice' for physician cultural competency training and the QIOs and OMH work in concert to promote the educational program and monitor its use among Medicare providers across the country.

As part of this initiative, CMS funded the development of a Facilitator's Guide which is a flexible instructional tool that bridges the self-directed online curriculum into a format for physician group education.

To date, almost 3,000 Medicare providers have registered to participate in this critical physician education initiative, earning over 9,000 continuing education credits and enhancing their skills in culturally competent practice.