The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:
(a) The COVID-19 health emergency has thrown into sharp relief longstanding health inequities along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines. Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people have been disproportionately affected during the pandemic; for example, the age-adjusted mortality rate among Black people with COVID-19 is more than three times as high as that of Whites.
(b) Disparities in access to care and quality of care contribute to racial health disparities. The disparate impact of the pandemic has highlighted the tiered nature of the current health care system, a structure that significantly impacts the quality of care patients receive along racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines.
(c) Reporting on the racially disproportionate impact of COVID-19 has called attention to the need for further data on racial and ethnic disparities in health care.
(d) Data currently reported by California hospitals that could be used to analyze access to and quality of care by age, sex, race, ethnicity, language, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, and socioeconomic status is not available to consumers or the general public.
(e) Although nonprofit hospitals are currently required to develop and report on their community benefits plans to provide services to vulnerable populations in their service areas, the law should be updated to ensure that the needs of vulnerable populations, including racial and ethnic groups experiencing disparate health outcomes and socially disadvantaged groups, are specifically considered and addressed.
(f) All California health systems and large physician providers, whether operated as nonprofit or for-profit, and by a county, the University of California, or other governmental entity, should systematically collect and publish racial and ethnic data for a range of standard access, quality, and outcome measures, as well as their processes to overcome biases in the provision of and access to health care services.
(g) As part of President Joe Biden’s January 2021 Executive Order Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are developing health equity measures as part of the proposed rules for other Medicare prospective payment systems, which may include stratification of quality measure results by race, ethnicity, dual eligible status, disability status, LGBTQ+ identity, and socioeconomic status and a standardized set of demographic data elements by hospital at the time of admission.
(h) The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Quality Indicators (QIs) are standardized, evidence-based measures of health care access and quality that are readily used with hospital inpatient administrative data for all payor categories to measure and track clinical performance and outcomes. The four areas for which AHRQ has developed indicators focus on adult prevention, pediatric prevention, inpatient quality, and patient safety. The state has used these indicators in the past to explore racial and ethnic disparities at an aggregate level.
(i) The dearth of racially and ethnically disaggregated data reflecting the health of communities of color underlies the challenges of a fully informed public health response, and is a matter of statewide concern. It will benefit the state’s public health response for hospitals and health systems to share information with the state, consumers, and the public using the standardized AHRQ QIs and NCQA HEDIS measures, as it will facilitate input by affected communities into addressing longstanding racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic health disparities, and thereby contribute to well-informed health policy.
(j) Facilitating the public sharing of data on health care disparities will assist the state and civil rights advocates in enforcing existing civil rights laws, including Section 11135 of the Government Code, the Unruh Civil Rights Act (Section 51 of the Civil Code), Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Public Law 88-352), and Section 1557 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Public Law 111-148).
(Added by Stats. 2021, Ch. 751, Sec. 2. (AB 1204) Effective January 1, 2022.)