Reducing Health Care Disparities: Where Are We Now?

For many years, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has been committed to finding and promoting ways to reduce racial and ethnic disparities. This issue brief gives a general overview of how the field of health care disparities has evolved in recent years to identify emerging perspectives, progress and current activity, and outstanding needs. The paper focuses specifically on health care disparities, while recognizing that these are obviously also intertwined with broader efforts to reduce health disparities.

Two major sources of information were used in developing this environmental scan. The first source involved a webbased search for recent literature and ongoing organizational work on this topic. The second source of information was from hour-long telephone interviews with a diverse set of eight key informants, who provided a spectrum of insights into different aspects of disparities work. Interviewees were nationally known policy-makers, researchers, and stakeholders who brought diverse perspectives to the work on disparities.