Racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in estimates of AHRQ patient safety indicators.

<bold>Background: </bold>Patient safety events that result from the happenstance of mistakes and errors should not occur systematically across racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic subgroups.<bold>Objective: </bold>To determine whether racial and ethnic differences in patient safety events disappear when income (a proxy for socioeconomic status) is taken into account.<bold>Research Design: </bold>This study analyzes administrative data from community hospitals in 16 states with reliable race/ethnicity measures in the 2000 Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), using the publicly available AHRQ patient safety indicators (PSIs).<bold>Results: </bold>Different indicators show different results for different racial/ethnic subgroups. Many events with higher rates for non-Hispanic blacks (compared with non-Hispanic whites) remain higher when income is taken into account, although such differences for Hispanics or Asian/Pacific Islanders (APIs) tend to disappear. Many events with lower rates for Hispanics and APIs remain lower than whites when income is taken into account, but for blacks, they disappear.<bold>Discussion: </bold>The higher rates for minorities that reflect the way health care is delivered raise troubling questions about potential racial/ethnic bias and discrimination in the US health care system, problems with cultural sensitivity and effective communication, and access to high-quality health care providers.<bold>Conclusions: </bold>The AHRQ PSIs are a broad screen for potential safety events that point to needed improvement in the quality of care for specific populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]