Journal of Rehabil itation Research & Development Race/ethnicity: Who is counting what?

Abstract—Misclassification of race and ethnicity in adminis-trative data may produce misleading results if it is overlooked or ignored. In this study, we examined the racial/ethnic classifi-cations of 1,084 veterans with stroke in Florida who received inpatient and outpatient services within the Department of Vet-erans Affairs (VA) healthcare system and who were also eligi-ble for Medicare between 2000 and 2001. We compared the reliability of racial/ethnic classifications between VA inpatient data, VA outpatient data, and Medicare data. Our results showed that (1) the rate of unknown racial/ethnic classification in VA outpatient and inpatient data was high, (2) minimizing the unknowns by substituting known values from other data when available would greatly enhance the overall and individ-ual classification reliability, (3) black and white classifications in the VA data had stronger agreement with Medicare data, and (4) Medicare data may under-represent Hispanic patients