Meeting the Health Care Needs of Persons with Disabilities

T he mission of the agency for healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) is to conduct and fund research to support improvement in health outcomes; strengthen quality measurement and improvement; and identify strategies to improve access to, encourage the appropriate use of, and reduce unnecessary expenditures in health care. The AHRQ's reauthorization (1999) directed the agency to address health care issues for such priority populations as low‐income groups, minorities, women, children, the elderly, the disabled, and other individuals with special health care needs. One of the AHRQ's responses was to establish the Office of Priority Populations Research to provide leadership for research on the improvement of health care for these populations. To achieve this goal, we are developing an agenda that addresses these populations' needs and also collaborates with other research funders. Identifying opportunities for health care research that improves health care for persons with disabilities (PWDs) will inevitably lead to debates about the relevance of current and prior research, whether the experiences of any of these populations are unique or shared with other groups, and how these research needs can best be met. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has established the Office of Priority Populations Research and is currently developing a research agenda to improve health care for persons with disability (PWDs). This article describes the background of and potential for the AHRQ disability agenda and some of the challenges ahead and considers future directions for disability‐related health services research. Strategies for this agenda might include ensuring the inclusion of PWDs in current and future health care research studies and database development; support for studies and data focusing exclusively on PWDs; and support for studies of the challenges common to all or most of the priority populations.