The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM, 2003) [Now the National Academy of Medicine as one of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, NASEM] groundbreaking report “Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care” documented differences in the quality of healthcare services received by people from racial and ethnic minority groups, highlighting the roles that racial stratification and social inequities play in health outcomes. Published almost 20 years after the landmark Malone-Heckler report, Unequal Treatment provided compelling models and evidence demonstrating how the health care system operates on multiple levels to create, sustain, and increase racial and ethnic health disparities – emphasizing the contributions of factors beyond the control of the individual patient. Reviewing evidence from the 2003 report and data generated subsequently, NASEM will convene an ad hoc expert committee to examine the current state of racial and ethnic disparities in U.S. healthcare. Congress commissioned the IOM in 1999 to study the root causes of racial and ethnic health disparities due to the growing concern around people from racial and ethnic minority groups and people experiencing poverty becoming a “permanent health care underclass.” Due to the historical marginalization of these populations in the healthcare system, high rates of being uninsured or underinsured, along with high health care costs driving differential access, utilization and quality of care, the IOM sought to illuminate how and why key factors impacting healthcare access, utilization and quality of care contributed to health disparities. The foci were two levels of the healthcare system that were hypothesized to contribute significantly to racial and ethnic health disparities. They first examined the operation of healthcare systems and the legal and regulatory climate in which health systems function, providing more nuanced explanations that moved beyond attributing health disparities to differential healthcare access. The second focused on understanding discriminatory practices at the patient, clinician, and health system levels – measured by bias, stereotyping, and clinician/patient concordance – as causes of racial and ethnic health disparities. The report provided actionable recommendations for evidenced-based targeted interventions that could be implemented over time to improve quality of care and reduce racial and ethnic healthcare disparities. The major findings from the IOM report reinforced that healthcare system limitations had particularly negative implications for the quality of care received by Black/African American persons and certain Hispanic/Latino persons based on their birthplace or English language fluency. However, most of the available data at the time was available for Black/African American persons and there was limited information in the IOM report on other minoritized populations. Among other findings, the report c...