Collecting Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Data in Electronic Health Records: Workshop Summary

Excerpt

In 2011, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released the report The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People: Building a Foundation for Better Understanding, the first comprehensive compilation of what is known about the health of each of these groups at different stages of life. This report also outlined an agenda for the research and data collection necessary to form a fuller understanding of this subject.

One of the recommendations in this report was that, provided that privacy concerns could be adequately addressed, information on patients’ sexual orientation and gender identity should be collected in electronic health records, just as information on race and ethnicity is routinely collected. Such data are essential because demographics provide the foundation for understanding any population’s status and needs. This recommendation recognized that the possible discomfort on the part of health care workers asking questions about sexual orientation and gender identity, a lack of knowledge by providers about how to elicit this information, and some hesitancy on the part of patients to disclose this information may be barriers to the collection of meaningful data on sexual orientation and gender identity.