This finding was the starting point to search for the underlying causes for disparities within an area with generally high childhood mortality.
The causes for disparities are multifactorial, including patient characteristics such as low health literacy, patient access barriers such as lack of healthcare insurance, provider factors such as cultural competency, and practice organizational factors such as a lack of systems to track patients at risk.
Lack of market power is not unique to the practices or clinics included in our study and may represent a consistent barrier and potential cause for disparities in HIE use.
Data from several studies have shown higher rates of neonatal death in women who deliver out of hours; variations in staff deployment have been implicated as one of the causes for this disparity.
Future studies are needed to identify ecological causes for the disparity in cancer incidence, which are most likely complex, possibly examining county-level factors related to sexual minorities' access to the healthcare system and quality of care delivery.
Addressing this survival disadvantage will require as a first step a commitment of resources to clarify and quantify the main causes for this disparity, and it is hoped that these results provide the necessary motivation and impetus for this to happen.
Given the extensive scientific literature documenting health disparities, this announcement calls for research to improve and elaborate explanations and understandings of the causes for health disparities.
The initiative included independent focus and discussion groups organized by the committee and the Duke Administrative Women's Network to identify the causes for gender disparities in the workplace.
70, 71 The causes for racial disparities for Coccidioides infections are not completely understood.
Although the root causes for health disparities are complex, well-developed, evidence-based approaches exist to address them and new research is likely to identify even more solutions.
