Transforming the National and Local Community Research Infrastructure to Promote Health Equity

The lack of disaggregated data for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AAs and NHPIs) continues to be a persistent barrier to advancing health equity among these populations, some of the fastest growing racial groups in the United States. The AA and NHPI populations are relatively small and health surveillance efforts often overlook them in data collection, citing that they are difficult to reach or too costly to oversample. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) new data standards offer opportunities for government-community collaborations to improve data collection on race, ethnicity, and language and support quality improvement efforts to address unequal treatment and health disparities among AAs, NHPIs, and other underserved, small populations. The Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum (APIAHF) has led and supported data initiatives that are transforming the national paradigm for data collection among AAs and NHPIs. We will discuss complementary national and community partnership strategies that APIAHF has undertaken to facilitate data collection. We will discuss APIAHF's partnership with National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) to support their Asian oversampling efforts with NHANES and other surveys. We will also discuss APIAHF‘s partnership with state-level community coalitions in building the community infrastructure for AAs and NHPIs to participate in research across 15 states through prioritizing research training and technical assistance and helping to improve community understanding of the critical roles data and research play in advocating and shaping healthy communities and systems. Finally, we will discuss the national implications of federal-community partnerships for promoting health equity.