Title 42 › CHAPTER 6A — PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE › SUBCHAPTER XXIX — DATA COLLECTION, ANALYSIS, AND QUALITY › § 300kk
By not later than 2 years after March 23, 2010, the Secretary must require that federal health and public‑health programs, activities, and surveys collect and report, when practical, basic demographic data on applicants, recipients, or participants. That data must include race, ethnicity, sex, primary language, and disability status; be recorded at the smallest geographic level that can be combined; be detailed enough to give reliable estimates for subgroups (using oversampling if needed); and include any other demographic items the Secretary finds useful for tracking health differences. The Secretary must use Office of Management and Budget standards for race and ethnicity and create standards for measuring sex, language, and disability. Data should be self‑reported (or reported by a parent or guardian for minors). The National Coordinator for Health IT must set national rules for managing the data and for interoperability and security. The Secretary must analyze the data to watch for health disparities at Federal and State levels and share those analyses with many HHS offices and other agencies, publish them on HHS websites, and allow additional research under data‑user agreements. Data must be protected so it cannot harm individuals and must have privacy safeguards at least as broad as those under the HIPAA rules in section 264(c). Collection must also cover underserved rural and frontier populations. Money "as may be necessary" is authorized for fiscal years 2010 through 2014, but data cannot be collected unless funds are directly appropriated in an appropriations Act. The Secretary must consult with officials from OPM, Defense, Veterans Affairs, the Census Bureau, Social Security, and other relevant Federal agencies.
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The Public Health and Welfare, Source: USLM XML via OLRC
Legislative History
Reference
Citation
42 U.S.C. § 300kk
Title 42, The Public Health and Welfare
Last Updated
Sep 23, 2026
Release point: 119-110