Leveraging Quality Measurement to Drive Equitable Cancer Care for Transgender Individuals

Abstract

Transgender and gender-diverse populations face multiple cancer care inequities and disparities across the cancer care journey, such as delayed cancer diagnosis, denial of care, and worse clinical outcomes. Efforts to reduce inequities across the cancer care continuum generally must identify and address the specific care needs of transgender individuals. Quality measurement plays a key role in identifying gaps in care and monitoring progress toward high-quality, equitable cancer care and outcomes. This manu­script explores several measurement tactics to drive care quality improvement for transgender individuals: updating quality measures and clinical guidelines to be inclusive of transgender people, stratifying existing quality measures by gender identity to identify disparities, and developing new quality measures to address the specific care needs and outcome inequities experienced by trans­gender patients.