Patient SOGI data is crucial for better identifying where health inequities exist for people who are often underserved or marginalized within healthcare settings. FQHCs are community-based organizations that provide primary and preventive healthcare for socioeconomically disadvantaged people in the USA. Routine and comprehensive collection of SOGI data at FQHCs, however, has been mandated only since 2016 by the US Health Resources and Services Administration, the agency that oversees and funds healthcare access for people who are uninsured, isolated or considered medically vulnerable.
At the time of the mandate, the first national analysis of SOGI data collection by the same research group found missing sexual orientation data for 77.1% of patients and missing gender identity data for 62.8% of patients at FQHCs. In the present study, Liu et al. looked at data in 2020 and 2021 from 1,297 FQHCs that provide care for nearly 30 million patients annually, to provide an update on the proportion of patients who identify as sexual and gender minorities. SOGI data completeness after 6 years improved considerably — missing data had dropped to 29.1% for sexual orientation and to 24.0% for gender identity. Alex Keuroghlian, one of the senior authors of the study, suggests several factors that may have contributed to this, including electronic-health-record requirements, more-refined data categories and widespread outreach from the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center at The Fenway Institute, which is tasked with increasing SOGI data collection and reporting across FQHCs.
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