Health Equity

New standards enable better reporting of doctors’ race, ethnicity

Knowing the characteristics of the physician workforce is key to advancing diversity, equity. A new initiative makes it easier to collect and share data.

By
Andis Robeznieks , Senior News Writer
| 5 Min Read

AMA News Wire

New standards enable better reporting of doctors’ race, ethnicity

Jan 29, 2025

The Physician Data Initiative, a work group that includes the AMA and other organizations representing different aspects of medical education, has been establishing practices for collecting, reporting and sharing sociodemographic data to better understand the health workforce.

A foundational purpose of this work is to identify and adopt common data definitions and categories in health care to advance research in a meaningful way, according to a webinar explaining the group’s efforts and progress.

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The webinar was hosted by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), which—along with the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME)—has been collaborating with the AMA on the initiative, which recently released data standards for language proficiency and race and ethnicity.

“This is an important initiative, and teams across the AMA, as well as our partners at AAMC and ACGME, have contributed time, energy and expertise to making this a success,” Fernando De Maio, PhD, the AMA’s vice president for health equity research and data use, said in an email.

De Maio noted that the establishment of the Physician Data Initiative was included in the AMA’s strategic plan to advance health equity as “a foundational activity for building alliances and sharing power.”

“There is more to be done, of course,” he added. “Our Physician Data Initiative gives us a valuable mechanism for working with our partners to improve the collection and reporting of key data—including physician race and ethnicity and language proficiency—and for addressing difficult data challenges moving forward.”

Other data standards that may be developed may include disability status, sexual orientation and gender identity, speakers said during the webinar.

The organizations involved “understand the whole medical education continuum … from medical school, to residency, to practicing physicians,” Rebecca S. Miller, the ACGME’s senior vice president of applications and data analysis, said during the webinar.

“Why are we doing this?” she said. “We think it's important that we all use the same mental model and that we all help create a diverse physician workforce and an equitable health care system.”

The key concepts behind the race and ethnicity standards are:

  • Short and long versions or descriptors.
  • Self-identification by individuals whose data is collected.
  • Write-in options.
  • Alphabetized listing of data values.
  • All values appear simultaneously.

“The purpose of this standard is to help organizations in the health care community to collect and report race and ethnicity data in a way that is as thoughtful as possible and cognizant of the complexities of these data while trying to align with federal practice where applicable,” according to the description of the standard on the Physician Data Initiative’s page on the AMA website.

The short version includes a choice of seven different categories such as “Asian,” “Black or African American,” “Middle Eastern or North African,” “Latino/Hispanic” or “White.”

The long version covers subcategories of those, such as “Bangladeshi,” “Chinese” or “Korean” under the “Asian” short version category.

Two key considerations are that the individual self identifies which category and subcategory they belong in and that write-in options are available in all cases, Tammy Weaver, AMA vice president for physician professional data, said in the webinar.

“We included write-in options for the categories and subcategories because we thought it was important not to force somebody into choosing a category if that's not how they identify,” Weaver explained. “The other important thing is that we believe that these values should always be alphabetized—you don't ever want to give the perception of value or undervaluing a certain category.”

The standard also included a section of seven basic principles.

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“Utilization of the data collection standard by organizations within the health care community is voluntary,” one principle states. “Similarly, responding to a race and ethnicity question must be voluntary and the data collection must contain language that clearly communicates the voluntary nature of the question to the individual responding to the data collection.”

The language-proficiency standard includes provisions adapted from the federal government’s Interagency Language Roundtable scale, which measures language ability in four communication skills: listening, reading, speaking and writing.

“We essentially modernized it,” Weaver said.

Also, the existing scale only addressed spoken language, the Physician Data Initiative standard includes sign language.

“Again, this is largely self-reported, and it is separated into five separate levels,” Weaver said. It “is really requiring that individual to do an assessment of where they fall.”

The levels are: 

  • Native/Near-native.
  • Advanced.
  • Good.
  • Fair.
  • Basic.

Examples of how language self-reported data may be used include identifying candidates with language skills that are aligned with the institution’s patient population, and for institutional planning for language-assistance services resource allocation to address gaps in languages to areas where language-concordant clinician deficits are greatest, the standard states.

The standards are available for public use and for health care organizations to use in their own data-collection activities.

“We are super excited to have released those standards and invite folks to use them,” Weaver said. “We're inviting people to provide commentary as they're using them.”

The standards are already being used in the AMA Physician Professional Data™ product, which contains current and historical data on more than 1.4 million physicians.

“The AMA will be using the standards in any data collection or maintenance of physician data,” Weaver said in an email. “We will be modifying our categories and collection methods accordingly. Additionally, we will be following these guidelines on producing aggregate reports.”

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