Blood Politics, Ethnic Identity, and Racial Misclassification among American Indians and Alaska Natives

Table 2

Proposed solutions to racial misclassification.

Domain	Solutions
Research	(i) Standardized methods to calculate disease rates across populations; (ii) Strengthened linkages between health care systems and tribal enrollment records, and IHS records; (iii) Challenge power differences; (iv) Collaborate with health professionals for improved race and ethnicity recording in patient medical records
Policy	(i) Create funding sources to support, build, and develop infrastructure such as tribal disease registries; (ii) Challenge power differences; (iii) Create policy that unifies and defines demographic categories from a community-oriented perspective; (iv) Enact legislation requiring consistent, verifiable, and reliable data from reporting sources, including departments of public health, disease registries, offices of vital records and health statistics, and other data end-points
Community	(i) Collaborate with health systems and IHS to provide linkages for improved data quality purposes; (ii) Initiate research driving community priorities to the forefront; (iii) Empower and educate community members to report and correct race/ethnicity data in medical records; (iv) Challenge power differences