NEW MISHC Health Disparities Dashboard

Last fall, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan charged MISHC and other BCBSM-sponsored Collaborative Quality Initiatives with creating health equity dashboards. The MISHC Health Disparities Dashboard – created by MISHC Statistician Lead Jeremy Albright, PhD – is now live for exploring and providing feedback on mishc.org. The dashboards allow users to easily explore areas of potential patient inequalities. The aim is to facilitate comparisons between social groups on a wide variety of outcomes and identify areas which can be acted on to reduce disparity.

The MISHC dashboard provides summaries of measures related to structural heart procedures that can be stratified by:

  • Age
  • Race
  • Sex
  • Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) risk score
  • Residence in a distressed community – as defined by the Distressed Communities Index, a composite measure of economic well-being based on the U.S. zip code.

The measures that can be explored are listed in the “Choose An Outcome” drop-down menu. Comparisons by demographic group can be performed by selecting an option from the “Choose A Variable” menu.

After selecting an item, the graphs will be updated to display p-values, which make it possible assess which differences are statistically significant.

The dashboard’s default is to display data from all participating hospitals in the state of Michigan. This can be changed by selecting a different option from the “Choose A Summary” menu.

Each site now has its own site-specific dashboard, accessible through the report repository using their quarterly report links. When a user accesses the site using the link, the “My Hospital” option will show data only from their institution.

There are also two other options for comparing the user’s site to the other hospitals in the state:

  • “Compare Hospitals V1” shows the user’s hospital compared to all other sites combined.
  • “Compare Hospitals V2” shows where the user’s site ranks relative to each other individual hospital.

We encourage you to explore the dashboard and identify potential opportunities to address and improve health disparities. We look forward to partnering with and supporting you as you use this resource and overview Dr. Albright created.