Improving Health Outcomes for Hispanic Populations by Recognizing Their Diversity

Although often lumped together into one homogenous group, Hispanic people are incredibly diverse, coming from a wide range of backgrounds. Unfortunately, this impairs data collection efforts that could identify the unique health concerns faced by different groups within Hispanic populations. By improving data collection practices, public health officials could target known health disparities and discover new ones in need of addressing.

According to , “For example, in 1997, the CDC released a study that found that Hispanic people were dying from asthma at higher rates than White or Black people. Burchard, a lung specialist, looked at the data and realized that the higher death rates were almost exclusively in the Northeast United States, where there is a robust Puerto Rican community. When the data were separated by country of origin, Burchard found that people of Mexican descent were less likely to have asthma, while people of Puerto Rican descent were much more likely to have it.”

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(Source: AAMC, December 15^th, 2022)