Website: http://www.nmqf.org
Dhow Member
National Minority Quality Forum partnerships and collaborations are wide-ranging. The Forum works with key stakeholders (including health-care providers and professionals, administrators, policy makers, payers, industry, and community and faith-based organizations) to improve the delivery of optimal care to diverse populations.
The Forum manages the Zip Code Analysis Project—a comprehensive health database that links demographic, environmental, claims, clinical-laboratory, and other data elements into a centralized data warehouse, linked by zip code. The Zip Code Analysis Project isolates risk communities with high incidence and/or prevalence of chronic diseases, evaluates the impact of specific interventions, and monitors changes in health service and status.
The Forum conducts customized studies to localize disease incidence and prevalence by various cohorts, identify trends, and forecast risk.
The Forum undertakes educational programs to promote a redesign of the American health-care system so that it is able to provide optimal care to each individual.
The Forum convenes expert panals to analyze existing clinical and performance guidelines, to ensure that they are not helping to institutionalize health disparities, and to recommend new or refined health-care performance measures that focus on areas in which racial and ethnic groups experience poor health-care quality or a disproportionate burden of disease or disability.
The Forum’s community-based programs include disease-specific demonstration programs that employ multilevel stakeholder networks and issue-based media and educational campaigns.
Forum Databases
The Forum’s nationwide database is a tremendous resource for researchers, corporations, and health-care organizations that need to understand and pinpoint disparities at the zip-code level in order to target chronic-illness interventions for specific populations.
Overview of the Indexes and Atlases
A unique aspect of the National Minority Quality Forum’s overall efforts to improve self-care, prevention, treatment, management, and monitoring has been the use of the Forum database to map health data in the United States. Forum indexes and atlases map disease incidence and prevalence, using zip-code-level data. These Web-based resources enable users to view and compare information graphically—nationwide, by state, by congressional district, and by state legislative district. The indexes and atlases provide focus and perspective for educational, advocacy, and public-affairs initiatives.The indexes and atlases are available to advocacy groups, policy makers, and sponsoring organizations through a password-protected link from the Forum Web site. They are updated periodically as new data become available.