Massachusetts Health Care Equity Dashboard

CHIA has released its inaugural health equity dashboard to monitor health disparities in Massachusetts.

While Massachusetts reports near-universal health care coverage statewide, gaps in health care persist among residents of different races, ethnicities, geographic regions, and other characteristics. Additionally, rising health care costs impact access, affordability, and utilization of health care services, that can lead to downstream impacts on health outcomes.

This dashboard showcases the measures of health care inequities that are monitored at CHIA with a focus on findings related to race, ethnicity, and geography. Metrics are sourced from CHIA’s existing health care equity reporting across 6 domains:

• Coverage—metrics focused on health insurance enrollment and coverage
• Access—metrics focused on availability of and access to health care services
• Utilization—metrics focused on use of health care services
• Affordability—metrics focused on cost of health care services for residents
• Finance—metrics focused on spending on health care services by payers and providers
• Quality—metrics focused on standards and/or value of health care services

Key Findings

• The burden of health care affordability issues was greater for Black and Hispanic residents than for White residents.
  
  
• Black residents relied on the emergency department for health care nearly twice as often (20 percent) and Hispanic residents more than two and half times as often (29 percent) as White residents (11 percent).
  
  
• Communities with higher proportions of residents identifying as Black or Hispanic tended to have lower spending on physician services, which includes both primary care and specialist care.
  
  
• Asian patients rated their experiences with primary care providers lower than White patients in all nine areas surveyed, with the largest differences in access to timely appointments and responsiveness, behavioral health screening, and support managing health goals.
  
  
• Black and Hispanic residents with insurance reported significantly lower rates of employer-sponsored insurance (53 percent and 44 percent, respectively) than insured White residents (72 percent).