This study addresses important public health and public policy questions related disparities in the health and health care utilization of Hispanic children age 0 through 19. The study compares nearly 34,000 Hispanic children, primarily of Mexican descent or origin, living in an agricultural county on the Arizona-Mexican-California border to more than 15,000 non-Hispanic children from the same county. It uses data from the Yuma County Community Health Data System (YCHDS) to make cross-sectional estimates for each of three years (1999-2001) and to analyze patterns of insurance coverage and episodes of un-insurance among a subset of the children for which the YCHDS includes three continuous years of data. The YCHDS is a community-based effort to systematically collect the administrative data produced by health insurers and providers and aggregate it to provide a micro data set on Yuma's children. The YCHDS provides a unique opportunity to directly analyze the differences between the health, health care, health insurance and outcomes of care for Hispanic and non-Hispanic under the framework of the IQlVTs definition of disparity. This study directly addresses the goals of Healthy People 2010, the Institute of Medicine's report on health disparities and the Latino Consortium of the American Academy of Pediatrics' strategic plan. The hypotheses from this research will provide information on disparities by examining the health and health utilization of Hispanic children compared to non-Hispanic children. The study also aims to more fully develop the potential for using community based administrative data for research and to produce information that can be used as the foundation for subsequent design and implementation of community interview surveys to be linked to the existing data. The investigators provide a spectrum of health services research, public health, clinical and economic experience necessary to complete this study.
