The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary’s Action Plan to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities included a priority to assess and heighten the impact of all HHS policies, programs, processes, and resource decisions to reduce health disparities. An action to support this priority is the recommendation that HHS program grantees submit health disparity impact statements as part of their grant applications. In response, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) Office of Behavioral Health Equity developed a strategy to reduce behavioral health disparities, which included the requirement of a Disparity Impact Statement (DIS) from grantees. In their statements, grantees are expected to describe how they would determine, analyze, and ensure access to, use of, and outcomes from behavioral healthcare services and activities for disparate subpopulations (i.e., vulnerable groups of people within larger populations of focus who experience disparities).
Community Science was engaged by SAMHSA to assist with advancing the implementation of the agency’s policy of requiring a DIS from grantees by:
- Developing an approach to determining the problem and solutions for addressing behavioral health disparities and eventually, elimination of such disparities. The approach is aimed at assisting service providers, technical assistance providers, state and local agencies, and other types of organizations to consider how to go about analyzing the nature of the behavioral health disparities affecting the people they serve, the contributing factors, and the appropriate solutions that are sustainable and meet the National Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) Standards.
- Developing, testing, and implementing a framework and strategy for assessing a sample of DISs in order for the agency to have baseline data about how the DIS requirement was understood and operationalized by grantees during the pilot phase. Based on findings from the assessment, Community Science will design a searchable database for SAMHSA to support future standard and ad hoc analyses to continue to monitor and inform the policy’s implementation.
This project provides Community Science with the opportunity to reflect on how service providers and state agencies understand the individual, organizational, and systemic factors that affect behavioral health outcomes of people and communities that experience a disproportionate amount of barriers and bias, and use data to inform their interventions.
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